Dialogue aux frontières du soi : de l'allergie à l'épithélium et aux cellules dendritiques des voies aériennes et digestives

Organism-environment interfaces play an essential role in nutriment and gas exchanges. While accomplishing this function, interface tissues must cope with a bacterial, viral and toxic burden. A complex network of interactions between epithelia and immune cells deals with the matter of beneficial versus potentially dangerous signals, resulting in the crucial decision of tolerance induction or breaking. Apart from skin, airway and gastrointestinal epithelia are probably the most important sites of tolerance or sensitisation induction. Because of the complex epithelial-immune cell interplay, experimental settings addressing one cell type are often too simplistic; conversely, ethical as well as methodological issues hamper data collection in humans. Therefore, experimental studies on human complex multicellular in vitro systems should unveil new aspects of the cellular crosstalk in interface tissues.