So, how would one correct this imbalance?
https://www.salk.edu...-what-they-eat/
LA JOLLA—The decision between scrambled eggs or an apple for breakfast probably won’t make or break your day. However, for your cells, a decision between similar microscopic nutrients could determine their entire identity. If and how nutrient preference impacts cell identity has been a longstanding mystery for scientists—until a team of Salk Institute immunologists revealed a novel framework for the complicated relationship between nutrition and cell identity.
The answers came while the researchers were exploring different kinds of immune cells. The immune system relies on specialized “effector” T cells to fight off pathogens, but in chronic infections like HIV or cancers, the perpetual activation of these cells can turn them into “exhausted” T cells unable to continue fighting. In the new study, Salk scientists discovered that a nutritional switch from acetate to citrate plays a key role in determining T cell fates, shifting them from active effector cells to exhausted cells. This finding highlights how metabolic changes influence T cell identity and opens avenues for interventions to sustain immune function.
The discovery that different nutrients can change a cell’s gene expression, function, and identity significantly advances scientists’ understanding of the relationship between nutrition and cellular health throughout the body. It may also be possible to develop new therapies that target these nutrient-dependent mechanisms to help T cells stay active and energetically optimized against chronic diseases like cancer or HIV.
The findings were published in Science on December 12, 2024.
“You know the saying, ‘You are what you eat?’ Well, we uncovered a way in which this actually operates in cells,” says Professor Susan Kaech, senior author of the study and holder of the NOMIS Chair at Salk. “This is really exciting on two levels: on a fundamental level, our findings show that a cell’s function can be directly linked to its nutrition; on a more specific level, this sheds new light on how T cells become dysfunctional or exhausted and what we could do to prevent that.”
