Summary According to the hygiene hypothesis, the increasing incidence of autoimmune diseases in western countries may be explained by changes in early microbial exposure, leading to altered immune maturation. We followed gut microbiome development from birth until age three in 222 infants in Northern Europe, where early-onset autoimmune diseases are common in Finland and Estonia but less prevalent in Russia. We found that Bacteroides species are lowly abundant in Russians but dominate in Finnish and Estonian infants. Therefore their Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) exposures arose primarily from Bacteroides rather than from Escherichia coli which is a potent innate immune activator. We show that Bacteroides LPS is structurally distinct from E. coli LPS and inhibits innate immune signaling and endotoxin tolerance; furthermore, unlike LPS from E. coli, B. dorei LPS does not decrease incidence of autoimmune diabetes in non-obese diabetic mice. Early colonization by immunologically silencing microbiota may thus preclude aspects of immune education.

SUMMARY During persistent antigen stimulation, CD8+ T cells show a gradual decrease in effector function, referred to as exhaustion, which impairs responses in the setting of tumors and infections. Here we demonstrate that the transcription factor NFAT controls the program of T cell exhaustion. When expressed in cells, an engineered form of NFAT1 unable to interact with AP-1 transcription factors diminished T cell receptor (TCR) signaling, increased the expression of inhibitory cell surface receptors, and interfered with the ability of CD8+ T cells to protect against Listeria infection and attenuate tumor growth in vivo. We defined the genomic regions occupied by endogenous and engineered NFAT1 in primary CD8+ T cells, and showed that genes directly induced by the engineered NFAT1 overlapped with genes expressed in exhausted CD8+ T cells in vivo. Our data show that NFAT promotes T cell anergy and exhaustion by binding at sites that do not require cooperation with AP-1.

SUMMARY Colonization of the fetal and infant gut microbiome results in dynamic changes in diversity, which can impact disease susceptibility. To examine the relationship between human gut microbiome dynamics throughout infancy and type 1 diabetes (T1D), we examined a cohort of 33 infants genetically predisposed to T1D. Modeling trajectories of microbial abundances through infancy revealed a subset of microbial relationships shared across most subjects. Although strain composition of a given species was highly variable between individuals, it was stable within individuals throughout infancy. Metabolic composition and metabolic pathway abundance remained constant across time. A marked drop in alpha-diversity was observed in T1D progressors in the time-window between seroconversion and T1D diagnosis, accompanied by spikes in inflammation-favoring organisms, gene functions, and serum and stool metabolites. This work identifies trends in the development of the human infant gut microbiome along with specific alterations that precede T1D onset and distinguish T1D progressors from non-progressors.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease that targets pancreatic islet beta cells and incorporates genetic and environmental factors 1 , including complex genetic elements 2 , patient exposures 3 and the gut microbiome 4 . Viral infections 5 and broader gut dysbioses 6 have been identified as potential causes or contributing factors; however, human studies have not yet identified microbial compositional or functional triggers that are predictive of islet autoimmunity or T1D. Here we analyse 10,913 metagenomes in stool samples from 783 mostly white, non-Hispanic children. The samples were collected monthly from three months of age until the clinical end point (islet autoimmunity or T1D) in the The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young (TEDDY) study, to characterize the natural history of the early gut microbiome in connection to islet autoimmunity, T1D diagnosis, and other common early life events such as antibiotic treatments and probiotics. The microbiomes of control children contained more genes that were related to fermentation and the biosynthesis of short-chain fatty acids, but these were not consistently associated with particular taxa across geographically diverse clinical centres, suggesting that microbial factors associated with T1D are taxonomically diffuse but functionally more coherent. When we investigated the broader establishment and development of the infant microbiome, both taxonomic and functional profiles were dynamic and highly individualized, and dominated in the first year of life by one of three largely exclusive Bifidobacterium species ( B. bifidum , B. breve or B. longum ) or by the phylum Proteobacteria. In particular, the strain-specific carriage of genes for the utilization of human milk oligosaccharide within a subset of B. longum was present specifically in breast-fed infants. These analyses of TEDDY gut metagenomes provide, to our knowledge, the largest and most detailed longitudinal functional profile of the developing gut microbiome in relation to islet autoimmunity, T1D and other early childhood events. Together with existing evidence from human cohorts 7 , 8 and a T1D mouse model 9 , these data support the protective effects of short-chain fatty acids in early-onset human T1D.

TET2 and TET3 redundantly regulate Foxp3 stability, and their activity can be modulated by vitamin C.

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TET (Ten-Eleven-Translocation) proteins are Fe(II) and α-ketoglutarate-dependent dioxygenases1-3 that modify the methylation status of DNA by successively oxidizing 5-methylcytosine (5mC) to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), 5-formylcytosine and 5-carboxycytosine1,3-5, potential intermediates in the active erasure of DNA methylation marks5,6. We show here that IDAX/ CXXC4, a player in the Wnt signaling pathway7 that has been implicated in malignant renal cell carcinoma8 and colonic villous adenoma9, functions as a negative regulator of TET2 protein expression. IDAX/ CXXC4 was originally encoded within an ancestral TET2 gene that underwent a chromosomal gene inversion during evolution, thus separating the TET2 CXXC domain from the catalytic domain. The Idax CXXC domain binds DNA sequences containing unmethylated CpGs, localises to promoters and CpG islands in genomic DNA, and interacts directly with the catalytic domain of Tet2. Unexpectedly, Idax expression resulted in caspase activation and Tet2 protein downregulation, in a manner that depended on DNA-binding through the Idax CXXC domain. Idax depletion prevented Tet2 downregulation in differentiating mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells, and shRNA against IDAX increased TET2 protein expression in the human monocytic cell line U937. Notably, we find that the expression and activity of TET3 are also regulated through its CXXC domain. Taken together, these results establish the separate and linked CXXC domains of TET2 and TET3 respectively as novel regulators of caspase activation and TET enzymatic activity.

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