Immunometabolism: Towards a Better Understanding the Mechanism of Parasitic Infection and Immunity

Abstract

As a relatively successful pathogen, several parasites can establish long-term infection in host. This “harmonious symbiosis” status relies on the “precise” manipulation of host immunity and metabolism, however, the underlying mechanism is still largely elusive. Immunometabolism is an emerging crossed subject in recent years. It mainly discusses the regulatory mechanism of metabolic changes on reprogramming the key transcriptional and post-transcriptional events related to immune cell activation and effect, which provides a novel insight for understanding how parasites regulate the infection and immunity in hosts. The present study reviewed the current research progress on metabolic reprogramming mechanism exploited by parasites to modulate the function in various immune cells, highlighting the future exploitation of key metabolites or metabolic events to clarify the underlying mechanism of anti-parasite immunity and design novel intervention strategies against parasitic infection.

Helminth and Host Crosstalk: New Insight Into Treatment of Obesity and Its Associated Metabolic Syndromes

“…In addition, the emerging immunometabolism, provides a novel insight on addressing these scientific puzzles mentioned above. Accumulating evidence has indicated that helminth or its derived molecules can reprogram the metabolic events in macrophages of host, thereby modulating the anti-infective immunity and providing a moderate living environment for the growth and development of helminth (163). Nevertheless, only sporadic mechanistic investigations in the view of immunometabolism have been reported (164,165).…”

Immunometabolism – The Role of Branched-Chain Amino Acids

“…Fatty acid oxidation may also be implicated in the regulation of the balance between effector T cells and Tregs ( 72 ). Indeed, fatty acid oxidation might promote generation of Tregs and inhibit polarization toward effector T cells ( 73 ).…”

Peritoneal GATA6+ macrophage drives hepatic immunopathogenesis and maintains the Treg cell niche in the liver

“…Recently published work indicated that S. japonicum infection caused the reprogramming of glucose and lipid metabolism in the liver of S. japonicum-infected mice [32][33][34]. Interesting, we found that the expression of glycolysis-related genes (PFKFB3, HK2), and fatty acid oxidative-related gene (PPAR-γ) in the liver were also decreased significantly after depletion of peritoneal macrophages; while restored macrophages in the abdominal cavity resulted in increased metabolic genes (Figure S4B-D), suggesting that peritoneal macrophages might contribute to the maintenance of liver metabolic homeostasis.…”