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Jack Strominger recounts his seminal work and contributions to understanding bacterial cell wall components, and thus how penicillin functions, and the implications of these discoveries for immunology.
Andrew McMichael recounts the seminal data he and colleagues produced demonstrating that cytotoxic T lymphocytes kill cells expressing antigenic peptides presented on major histocompatibility complex class I molecules.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Burnet's clonal selection theory. Here Gustav Nossal recounts his pioneering work that supported Burnet's theory and led to the death of the direct template hypothesis.
Innate immunity has come to the forefront in immunology, aided by the discovery of antifungal defense in drosophila. Here Jules Hoffmann recounts his team's pioneering work on insect immunity.
Blimp-1 is a transcription factor that affects the expression of hundreds of genes in lymphocytes. Recent work confirmed its role in the maturation of B cells into immunoglobulin-secreting plasmablasts, as well as in the control of T cell homeostasis and tolerance. What follows is a short history of how Blimp-1 was discovered.
Discovering the transcription factors that direct lineage commitment in the T helper cell was a formidable task. Laurie Glimcher describes how she and Susanne Szabo hunted down T-bet, a transcription factor that is a 'master regulator' of commitment to the T helper type 1 lineage.
