Natalia Polouliakh

Commensal bacteria and the host immune system constitute an integrated defense system. Maintenance of bacterial flora homeostasis is particularly importance to the development of preventive strategies against immune disorders such as autoimmune disease. First of all we must understand the relationship between bacterial flora and host physiology to be able to figure out about the architecture of immune system under different environmental conditions. This architecture can be recognized both in intracellular signal transduction pathways and intercellular signaling processes, known to have a bow-tie structure.
Understanding the stimuli-dependent changes in each cell type gives us the opportunity to predict the convergence of the immune system and determine the core elements, which removal is vulnerable to system. Discovering such mechanisms will increase human capabilities to maintain immune system homeostasis on different levels and systematically understand the diseases outbreak and prevention mechanisms.

Natalia Polouliakh, Richard Nock, Frank Nielsen, Hiroaki Kitano : G-Protein Coupled Receptor Signaling Architecture of Mammalian Immune Cells. PLoS ONE, 4(1):e4189 January 2009.