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NRI AT 20: INNATE IMMUNITY

Entering the neutrophil trap

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 21, page 615 (2021)Cite this article

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Neutrophils are supreme at hunting down, eating and killing microbes. One key neutrophil killing mechanism is the phagosome, which contains engulfed microbes. Granules deliver tiny parcels of toxic mediators to the phagosome, ultimately destroying the compartmentalized microbes. Shigella bacteria, which cause dysentery, are unique pathogens that can escape the phagosome in all eukaryotic cells, except neutrophils. As neutrophils use proteases to chop up bacterial proteins, we had predicted that they were disarming Shigella by degrading bacterial proteins used for escaping the phagosome.

To test this experimentally, in the early 2000s we infected neutrophils with Shigella and monitored whether proteases such as neutrophil elastase (NE) colocalized with the phagosome. We were surprised that, in addition to observing intracellular phagosome-bound bacteria, we saw extracellular bacteria ensnared in filamentous structures decorated with NE (Brinkmann et al., 2004). The filaments stained positive with DNA dyes and histone antibodies and were shown to be decondensed chromatin derived from the neutrophil nucleus. In addition to NE, a discrete set of granular and cytoplasmic antimicrobial proteins were bound to the modified chromatin filaments.

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References

Original articles

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, Berlin, Germany

    Volker Brinkmann & Arturo Zychlinsky

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  1. Volker Brinkmann
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  2. Arturo Zychlinsky
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Correspondence to Arturo Zychlinsky.

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Brinkmann, V., Zychlinsky, A. Entering the neutrophil trap. Nat Rev Immunol 21, 615 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41577-021-00614-y

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