Support for UNRWA's survival

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provides life-saving humanitarian aid for 5·4 million Palestine refugees now entering their eighth decade of statelessness and conflict. About a third of Palestine refugees still live in 58 recognised camps. UNRWA operates 702 schools and 144 health centres, some of which are affected by the ongoing humanitarian disasters in Syria and the Gaza Strip. It has dramatically reduced the prevalence of infectious diseases, mortality, and illiteracy. Its social services include rebuilding infrastructure and homes that have been destroyed by conflict and providing cash assistance and micro-finance loans for Palestinians whose rights are curtailed and who are denied the right of return to their homeland

Human fetal dendritic cells promote prenatal T-cell immune suppression through arginase-2.

During gestation the developing human fetus is exposed to a diverse range of potentially immune-stimulatory molecules including semi-allogeneic antigens from maternal cells, substances from ingested amniotic fluid, food antigens, and microbes. Yet the capacity of the fetal immune system, including antigen-presenting cells, to detect and respond to such stimuli remains unclear. In particular, dendritic cells, which are crucial for effective immunity and tolerance, remain poorly characterized in the developing fetus. Here we show that subsets of antigen-presenting cells can be identified in fetal tissues and are related to adult populations of antigen-presenting cells. Similar to adult dendritic cells, fetal dendritic cells migrate to lymph nodes and respond to toll-like receptor ligation; however, they differ markedly in their response to allogeneic antigens, strongly promoting regulatory T-cell induction and inhibiting T-cell tumour-necrosis factor-α production through arginase-2 activity. Our results reveal a previously unappreciated role of dendritic cells within the developing fetus and indicate that they mediate homeostatic immune-suppressive responses during gestation

Mapping the human DC lineage through the integration of high-dimensional techniques

Dendritic cells (DC) are professional antigen-presenting cells that orchestrate immune responses. The human DC population comprises two main functionally specialized lineages, whose origins and differentiation pathways remain incompletely defined. Here, we combine two high-dimensional technologies-single-cell messenger RNA sequencing (scmRNAseq) and cytometry by time-of-flight (CyTOF)-to identify human blood CD123+CD33+CD45RA+ DC precursors (pre-DC). Pre-DC share surface markers with plasmacytoid DC (pDC) but have distinct functional properties that were previously attributed to pDC. Tracing the differentiation of DC from the bone marrow to the peripheral blood revealed that the pre-DC compartment contains distinct lineage-committed subpopulations, including one early uncommitted CD123high pre-DC subset and two CD45RA+CD123low lineage-committed subsets exhibiting functional differences. The discovery of multiple committed pre-DC populations opens promising new avenues for the therapeutic exploitation of DC subset-specific targetin

"Ancient pigs reveal a near-complete genomic turnover following their introduction to Europe (vol 116, pg17231, 2019)

The authors note that the affiliation for Alexandros Triantafyllidis and Panoraia Alexandri should be listed as Department of Genetics, Development and Molecular Biology, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece; and that the affiliation for Rose-Marie Arbogast should be listed as CNRS UMR 7044, Maison interuniversitaire des sciences de l'Homme, F-67083 Strasbourg Cedex, France. The corrected author and affiliation lines appear below. The online version has been corrected