Subversion of mouse dendritic cell subset function by bacterial pathogens

•Dendritic cells can sense an infection and be activated to undergo a maturation process leading to immune response.•Targeting Dendritic cell subsets may have the potential for improving bacterial clearance and vaccination efficiency.•In vitro bone marrow-derived dendritic cell models were developed sharing characteristics with their in vivo counterparts.•Bacterial infection impacts on surface marker expression and cytokine secretion by Dendritic cell.•In vitro DC models need to be correlated with in vivo models of infection.

Dendritic cells (DCs) play an important role as sentinels of the immune system in initiating and controlling the quality of adaptive immune responses. Located at entry points of the host they can sense and alert the body from dangers such as infection by pathogenic bacteria. Considering their strategic localization it is not surprising that DCs have evolved in a series of DC subtypes, which are well adapted to their microenvironment. Nowadays, the advent of the identification of specific DC subtypes has opened the way for the study of pathogen-DCs interactions and the involved mechanisms of these interactions. Due to key aspect of DCs, several bacterial pathogens have taken advantage of these cells and developed mechanisms to subvert DC function and thereby evade the immune system. This review brings recent insights into DC-pathogenic bacteria cross-talk using the mouse model of infection with an emphasis on DC subtypes.