NDT Advance Access originally published online on November 30, 2006
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2007 22(2):350-352; doi:10.1093/ndt/gfl679
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© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ERA-EDTA. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Formation of lymphoid-like tissue in the kidney—is there a role for chemokines?
III. Medizinische Klinik, Zentrum für Innere Medizin, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf, Martinistrasse 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence and offprint requests to: Rolf A. K. Stahl, III. Medizinische Klinik, Zentrum für Innere Medizin, Universitätsklinikum Hamburg Eppendorf, Martinistrasse 52, 20246, Hamburg Germany. Email: rstahl@uke.uni-hamburg.de
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Leucocyte recruitment is a hallmark of almost every inflammatory reaction. The time course of leucocyte subset infiltration, along with the tissue distribution of lymphocytes, is a highly regulated process. An increasing number of recent studies have shown the existence of dense leucocyte clusters with separated T- and B-cell zones in chronic autoimmune diseases, including inflammatory kidney disease [1–3]. The highly organized structure of these aggregates is reminiscent of lymph follicles in secondary lymphatic organs, hence they are termed ‘tertiary’ lymphoid tissue. Questions arising from this observation concern the mechanisms that underlie the formation of these lymphoid follicles and their functional role in the immune response.
The molecule family of chemokines and their receptors play a central role in leucocyte trafficking. A specific subset, the so-called lymphoid chemokines (Table 1), is responsible for the development and structural integrity of secondary lymphoid organs [4]. These chemokines