What is it about?

We have been studying a transplantation reaction in an ancestral vertebrate organism called a tunicate, which is similar to how humans accept or reject bone marrow transplants. This paper provides the first insight into how a tunicate can discriminate between self and non self, providing a new way to study what underlies bone marrow rejection.

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Why is it important?

Leukemia would be eliminated if we could transplant bone marrow between any two people, without waiting for a donor to match the recipient. However, an immune cell, called a Natural Killer cell, kills unmatched grafts . We study a transplantation rejection response in an ancestral vertebrate and found that it uses the exact same mechanisms as Natural Killer cells, but in this organism it is much easier to study the responses. Our goal is to use this organism to understand how to manipulate immune cells in humans, which is critical for controlling responses to transplantation, autoimmunity and cancer.

Perspectives

This study was a true scientific adventure. We first learned that what we thought was true for the last 15 years was vastly oversimplified. Using new tools, we discovered both a completely unexpected complexity, as well as several results that were counterintuitive with our previous studies. Yet it was that very diversity that gave us the first true insight into a question that has been studied for over a century- how does an individual discriminate self from non-self to fight infections and cancer, and where did that ability come from?

Tony De Tomaso
University of California Santa Barbara

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This page is a summary of: Exceptional diversity of allorecognition receptors in a nonvertebrate chordate reveals principles of innate allelic discrimination, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2519372122.
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