Mucosal epithelial cells: the initial sentinels and responders controlling and regulating immune responses to viral infections

In the context of host defense,immune protection is mostly provided by hematopoietic immune cells,including neutrophils,macrophages,T cells,B cells,etc.However,in recent decades,emerging evidence has identified many additional diverse roles of nonhematopoietic cells in mammalian immunity,although most of these studied focused on a single-cell type.In July 2020,Krausgruber et al.in the laboratory of Christoph Bock published the paper“Structural cells are key regulators of organ-specific immune responses”in Nature.The authors used multiomics and systematically investigated the regulation of immune-associated genes in three major types of structural cells(epithelial cells,endothelial cells,and fibroblasts)in 12 different organs in mice.