TLR5-Mediated Sensing of Gut Microbiota Is Necessary for Antibody Responses to Seasonal Influenza Vaccination

SummarySystems biological analysis of immunity to the trivalent inactivated influenza vaccine (TIV) in humans revealed a correlation between early expression of TLR5 and the magnitude of the antibody response. Vaccination of Trl5−/− mice resulted in reduced antibody titers and lower frequencies of plasma cells, demonstrating a role for TLR5 in immunity to TIV. This was due to a failure to sense host microbiota. Thus, antibody responses in germ-free or antibiotic-treated mice were impaired, but restored by oral reconstitution with a flagellated, but not aflagellated, strain of E. coli. TLR5-mediated sensing of flagellin promoted plasma cell differentiation directly and by stimulating lymph node macrophages to produce plasma cell growth factors. Finally, TLR5-mediated sensing of the microbiota also impacted antibody responses to the inactivated polio vaccine, but not to adjuvanted vaccines or the live-attenuated yellow fever vaccine. These results reveal an unappreciated role for gut microbiota in promoting immunity to vaccination

A distributed, service-based framework for knowledge applications with multimedia

The current trend in distributed systems is towards service-based integration. This article describes an ontology-driven framework implemented to provide knowledge management for data of different modalities, with multimedia processing, annotation, and reasoning provided by remote services. The framework was developed in, and is presented in the context of, the Medical Imaging and Advanced Knowledge Technologies (MIAKT) project that sought to support the Multidisciplinary Meetings (MDMs) that take place during breast cancer screening for diagnosing the patient. However, the architecture is entirely independent of the specific application domain and can be quickly prototyped into new domains. An Enterprise server provides resource access to a client-side presentation application which, in turn, provides knowledge visualization and markup of any supported media, as defined by a domain-dependent ontology-supported language