Reviews & Analysis

In this Opinion article, the authors consider how poverty and diet can shape the microbiota and immune health. They highlight how this contributes to the greater levels of chronic disease that are experienced by low-income individuals in high-income societies.

Carl Figdor and colleagues propose that delivering cancer immunotherapy in the context of engineered three-dimensional scaffolds may boost anticancer immunity. The synthetic scaffolds, which can be linked to immunomodulatory factors, can act as immune niches to support the priming and maintenance of antitumour immune responses.

Diversity-generating immune strategies can act across the whole genome or be targeted to specific loci, with different consequences for host–pathogen co-evolution.

In this Opinion article, the authors discuss our growing appreciation of antigen-inexperienced memory T cell subsets. They focus on the development and functions of the recently described 'virtual memory' and 'innate memory' CD8⁺T cell populations, and propose a unified nomenclature for these subsets.

In this Opinion article, the authors discuss the limitations of categorizing tissue-resident macrophages based on their ontogeny. Instead, they propose that competition for a limited number of tissue niches may serve as a better framework for understanding the origins and functions of tissue macrophages.

Innate immune responses are triggered in response to the sensing of pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) or damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) by pattern recognition receptors (PRRs). An emerging idea is that inflammasome activation may also occur independently of PRR activation following a disturbance in cellular homeostasis. The authors explore this concept and the implications for chronic inflammatory disease in this Opinion article.