Plos Bio reveals: Why has the "fat shield" become a protective umbrella for cancer cells?

The best doctors in the world are the body’s own immune cells.

You may be wondering how NK cells exercise their killing function? Studies have found that powerful NK cells can always quickly find aging cells, cancer cells, viruses, etc.

As the saying goes, killing 10,000 enemies and self-inflicting 8,000, but why can NK cells not be implicated in this fatal accident? Recently, a recent study led by a scientific research team at Columbia University uncovered the mystery.

Related research was published in "Plos Biology" with the title Degranulation enhances presynaptic membrane packing, which protects NK cells from perforin-mediated autolysis

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As compared with other cells, NK cells show a highly ordered synaptic lipid membrane, so researchers speculate that the "fat shield" of NK cells may be a mysterious and unknown protein-made extracellular membrane lipid.

In order to verify the researchers' conjecture, the researchers used a fluorescent sensor to measure the lipid packing density of the NK cell plasma membrane, and specifically evaluated the contact site of the NK cell with the target cell

NK cells have a presynaptic membrane with high lipid order in the process of target cell participation

Subsequently, the researchers assessed whether lipid accumulation would affect the survival of NK cells during cytotoxicity

7KC induces NK cell death during target killing

But it should be noted that although 7KC does not impair the ability of NK cells to recognize and destroy target cells, researchers still want to determine whether NK cell death is due to the inherent toxicity of 7KC? For this reason, the researchers pretreated YTS (NK/T cell lymphoma cells) cells with different concentrations of 7KC and found that the viability of YTS cells did not change in an environment without target cells.

After determining the authenticity of the existence of the NK cell "golden bell", the researchers focused their research on the self-protection mechanism of NK cells

Dissolving the granular membrane enhances the protective power of NK cells

But what is frustrating is that this powerful self-protection mechanism of NK cells allows the cunning cancer cells to take advantage of the loopholes

Cancer cells can evade the killing of NK cells by producing dense postsynaptic lipid membranes

All in all, this study shows that the thick and orderly phospholipid bilayer of NK cells is the key to avoiding the "killing" of target cells, rather than a certain protein molecule previously suspected

Reference materials:

[1]https://medicalxpress.

[2]https://journals.

[3]https://zhuanlan.