Abstract
Secondary lymphoid organs have developed segregated niches that are able to initiate and maintain effective immune responses. Such global organization requires tight control of diverse cellular components, specifically those that regulate lymphocyte trafficking. Fibroblastic reticular cells (FRCs) form a densely interconnected network in lymph nodes and provide key factors necessary for T cell migration and retention, and foster subsequent interactions between T cells and dendritic cells. Development of integrative systems biology approaches has made it possible to elucidate this multilevel complexity of the immune system. Here, we present a graph theory-based analysis of the FRC network in murine lymph nodes, where generation of the network topology is performed using high-resolution confocal microscopy and 3D reconstruction. This approach facilitates the analysis of physical cell-to-cell connectivity, and estimation of topological robustness and global behavior of the network when it is subjected to perturbation in silico.
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Funding
Funding was provided by European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 289720, the Swiss National Science Foundation (141918 to BL) and the Russian Science Foundation (15-11-00029 to GB). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
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Novkovic, M., Onder, L., Bocharov, G., Ludewig, B. (2017). Graph Theory-Based Analysis of the Lymph Node Fibroblastic Reticular Cell Network. In: Rainger, G., Mcgettrick, H. (eds) T-Cell Trafficking. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1591. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6931-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-6931-9_4
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