In recent years, researchers have devoted much attention to the diverse roles of macrophages and their contributions to tissue development, wound healing, and angiogenesis. What should not be lost in the discussions regarding the diverse biology of these cells is that when perturbed, macrophages are the primary contributors to potentially pathological inflammatory processes. Macrophages stand poised to rapidly produce large amounts of inflammatory cytokines in response to danger signals. The production of these cytokines can initiate a cascade of inflammatory mediator release that can lead to wholesale tissue destruction. The destructive inflammatory capability of macrophages is amplified by exposure to exogenous interferon-γ, which prolongs and heightens inflammatory responses. In simple terms, macrophages can thus be viewed as incendiary devices with hair triggers waiting to detonate. We have begun to ask questions about how these cells can be regulated to mitigate the collateral destruction associated with macrophage activation.

There have been many chapters written about macrophage polarization. These chapters generally focus on the role of macrophages in orchestrating immune responses by highlighting the T-cell-derived cytokines that shape these polarizing responses. This bias toward immunity is understandable, given the importance of macrophages to host defense. However, macrophages are ubiquitous and are involved in many different cellular processes, and describing them as immune cells is undoubtedly an oversimplification. It disregards their important roles in development, tissue remodeling, wound healing, angiogenesis, and metabolism, to name just a few processes. In this chapter, we propose that macrophages function as transducers in the body. According to Wikipedia, “A transducer is a device that converts energy from one form to another.” The word transducer is a term used to describe both the “sensor,” which can interpret a wide range of energy forms, and the “actuator,” which can switch voltages or currents to affect the environment. Macrophages are able to sense a seemingly endless variety of inputs from their environment and transduce these inputs into a variety of different response outcomes. Thus, rather than functioning as immune cells, they should be considered more broadly as cellular transducers that interpret microenvironmental changes and actuate vital tissue responses. In this chapter, we will describe some of the sensory stimuli that macrophages perceive and the responses they make to these stimuli to achieve their prime directive, which is the maintenance of homeostasis.

Background: PILR␣ is an inhibitory receptor predominantly expressed in myeloid cells. Results: NPDC1 and COLEC12 are novel PILR␣ ligands. PILR␣ arginine residues 133 (mouse) and 126 (human) are critical contact residues. Conclusion: PILR␣/ligand interactions involve a conserved domain in PILR␣ and a sialylated protein domain in the ligand. Significance: PILR␣ interacts with various ligands to alter myeloid cell function.

The priming of macrophages with IFN-γ prior to TLR stimulation results in enhanced and prolonged inflammatory cytokine production. Here, we demonstrate that following TLR stimulation, macrophages up regulate the adenosine 2b receptor (A2bR) to enhance their sensitivity to immunosuppressive extracellular adenosine. This up-regulation of A2bR leads to the induction of a macrophage with an immunoregulatory phenotype and the down regulation of inflammation. IFN-γ priming of macrophages, selectively prevents the induction of the A2bR in macrophages to mitigate sensitivity to adenosine and prevent this regulatory transition. IFN-γ-mediated A2bR blockade leads to a prolonged production of TNFα and IL-12 in response to TLR ligation. The pharmacological inhibition or the genetic deletion of the A2bR results in a hyper-inflammatory response to TLR ligation, similar to IFN-γ treatment of macrophages. Conversely, the overexpression of A2bR on macrophages blunts the IFN-γ effects and promotes the development of immunoregulatory macrophages. Thus, we propose a novel mechanism whereby IFN-γ contributes to host defense, by desensitizing macrophages to the immunoregulatory effects of adenosine. This mechanism overcomes the transient nature of TLR activation, and prolongs the anti-microbial state of the classically activated macrophage. This study may offer promising new targets to improve the clinical outcome of inflammatory diseases in which macrophage activation is dysregulated.

Macrophages undergo profound physiological alterations when they encounter pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). These alterations can result in the elaboration of cytokines and mediators that promote immune responses and contribute to the clearance of pathogens. These innate immune responses by myeloid cells are transient. The termination of these secretory responses is not due to the dilution of stimuli, but rather to the active downregulation of innate responses induced by the very PAMPs that initiated them. Here, we describe a purinergic autoregulatory program whereby TLR-stimulated macrophages control their activation state. In this program, TLR-stimulated macrophages undergo metabolic alterations that result in the production of ATP and its release through membrane pannexin channels. This purine nucleotide is rapidly hydrolyzed to adenosine by ectoenzymes on the macrophage surface, CD39 and CD73. Adenosine then signals through the P1 class of seven transmembrane receptors to induce a regulatory state that is characterized by the downregulation of inflammatory cytokines and the production of anti-inflammatory cytokines and growth factors. This purinergic autoregulatory system mitigates the collateral damage that would be caused by the prolonged activation of macrophages and rather allows the macrophage to maintain homeostasis. The transient activation of macrophages can be prolonged by treating macrophages with IFN-γ. IFN-γ-treated macrophages become less sensitive to the regulatory effects of adenosine, allowing them to sustain macrophage activation for the duration of an adaptive immune response.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative autoimmune disorder caused by chronic inflammation and demyelination within the central nervous system (CNS). Clinical studies in MS patients have demonstrated efficacy with B cell targeted therapies such as anti-CD20. However, the exact role that B cells play in the disease process is unclear. Activation Induced cytidine deaminase (AID) is an essential enzyme for the processes of antibody affinity maturation and isotype switching. To evaluate the impact of affinity maturation and isotype switching, we have interrogated the effect of AID-deficiency in an animal model of MS. Here, we show that the severity of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) induced by the extracellular domain of human myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG1-125) is significantly reduced in Aicda deficient mice, which, unlike wild-type mice, lack serum IgG to myelin associated antigens. MOG specific T cell responses are comparable between wild-type and Aicda knockout mice suggesting an active role for antigen experienced B cells. Thus affinity maturation and/or class switching are critical processes in the pathogenesis of EAE.

Stimulated macrophages are potent producers of inflammatory mediators. This activity is highly regulated, in part, by resolving molecules to prevent tissue damage. In this study, we demonstrate that inflammation induced by Toll-like receptor stimulation is followed by the upregulation of receptors for adenosine (Ado) and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), which help terminate macrophage activation and initiate tissue remodeling and angiogenesis. Macrophages can be hematopoietically derived from monocytes in response to 2 growth factors: macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF). We examine how exposure to either of these differentiation factors shapes the macrophage response to resolving molecules. We analyzed the transcriptomes of human monocyte-derived macrophages stimulated in the presence of Ado or PGE2 and demonstrated that, in macrophages differentiated in M-CSF, Ado and PGE2 induce a shared transcriptional program involving the downregulation of inflammatory mediators and the upregulation of growth factors. In contrast, macrophages generated in GM-CSF fail to convert to a growth-promoting phenotype, which we attribute to the suppression of receptors for Ado and PGE2 and lower production of these endogenous regulators. These observations indicate that M-CSF macrophages are better prepared to transition to a program of tissue repair, whereas GM-CSF macrophages undergo more profound activation. We implicate the differential sensitivity to pro-resolving mediators as a contributor to these divergent phenotypes. This research highlights a number of molecular targets that can be exploited to regulate the strength and duration of macrophage activation.

Preceding antibody constant regions are switch (S) regions varying in length and repeat density that are targets of activation-induced cytidine deaminase. We asked how participating S regions influence each other to orchestrate rearrangements at the IgH locus by engineering mice in which the weakest S region, Se, is replaced with prominent recombination hotspot Sμ. These mice produce copious polyclonal IgE upon challenge, providing a platform to study IgE biology and therapeutic interventions. The insertion enhances e germ-line transcript levels, shows a preference for direct vs. sequential switching, and reduces intraswitch recombination events at native Sμ. These results suggest that the sufficiency of Sμ to mediate IgH rearrangements may be influenced by contextdependent cues.immunoglobulin | AICDA | asthma | allergy | germline transcription S witch (S) regions are essential and specialized targets of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID) (1-3) that are ordered 5′-Sμ-Sγ3-Sγ1-Sγ2b-Sγ2a-Se-Sα-3′ (4) in the mouse IgH locus (Fig. 1A). Joining of distant dsDNA breaks (DSBs) between donor Sμ and any downstream S region constitutes class switch recombination (CSR). CSR to specific constant heavychain genes is subject to tight transcriptional regulation, which increases the accessibility of a given S region before CSR (5, 6). The primary role of S regions is to seed DSBs (7), which are repaired by nonhomologous end joining (8) predominately during the G1 phase of the cell cycle (9), whereas homologous recombination is dispensable in CSR (8, 10, 11). AID initiates CSR by targeting cytidines in transcribed repeat-rich S regions (12)(13)(14). Limited amounts of active AID in B cells can be inferred from recent studies that showed that AID heterozygous mice have reduced levels of somatic hypermutation (SHM) and CSR (15-18). Epigenetic modifications during CSR are emerging as an important regulatory mechanism to influence CSR (19). Thus, complex regulatory mechanisms act in concert to ensure appropriate AID regulation, likely to limit its off-target activity (20).S regions have acquired intrinsic properties to make them the ultimate substrate for AID within the genome (21). Ancient S regions resemble SHM substrates, except they have a higher density of hotspots. The density of hotspots in S regions is significantly higher than in V regions (4), potentially creating areas highly susceptible to DSBs (4). In mammals, S regions appear to have further diverged by incorporating features such as the ability to form R-loops, which are single-stranded DNA loops formed by the association of an RNA transcript with a DNA template (22) and G-quartets, which are four-stranded structures of guanine-rich DNA (23), to maximize them as targets for AID (24). S region length enhances CSR (25), and there is an inverse correlation between the distance of DSBs and recombination frequency (7). In mice, Se is one of the shortest and least repetitive S regions, and, with the exception of Sα, it is the farthest from Sμ (4). CSR to Se involves...