Immunology

eLife Assessment

This important study shows that the Nora virus, a natural Drosophila pathogen that also persistently infects many laboratory fly stocks, infects intestinal stem cells (ISCs), leading to a shorter life span and increased sensitivity to intestinal infection with the bacterium Pseudomonas. The authors provide convincing data to support their conclusions. The paper provides new insights into virus-host interactions in the Drosophila gut and serves as a warning for scientists who use the fruit fly as a model to study gut physiology.

eLife Assessment

This study provides a valuable contribution to the field of zebrafish immunology by demonstrating that the two TNF paralogs tnfa and tnfb show distinct cellular sources and temporal expression patterns during inflammation. These findings are potentially significant because they suggest regulatory divergence and functional specialization within the TNF signaling system in teleosts. While the evidence supporting differential expression is convincing, the work remains largely observational and would benefit from functional experiments and deeper mechanistic insight to determine whether these differences translate into distinct roles in inflammatory signaling. This work will be of interest to immunologists interested in inflammatory cytokine evolution and immune regulation in vertebrates.

eLife Assessment

AIRE has been well known to contribute to immune self-tolerance in the thymus by expressing auto-antigens; in this manuscript, the authors describe unexpected findings about the interaction of AIRE with AID in B cells, and its function in the immune system, thereby contributing to a fundamental understanding of the broader functions of AIRE. The strength of this manuscript is that, by employing biochemical and genetic experiments, the authors convincingly show interaction between AIRE and AID and subsequent AIRE's function in the GC responses. However, two weak points exist: first, the connection between AIRE, auto-anti IL17 Abs, and IL17-positive effector T cells, and second, like the thymus, expression of auto-antigens by AIRE in the GC B cells has not been tested.