HIF1α is required for NK cell metabolic adaptation during virus infection
Abstract
Natural killer (NK) cells are essential for early protection against virus infection, and must metabolically adapt to the energy demands of activation. Here, we found upregulation of the metabolic adaptor hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) is a feature of mouse NK cells during murine cytomegalovirus (MCMV) infection in vivo. HIF-1 α -deficient NK cells failed to control viral load, causing increased morbidity. No defects were found in effector functions of HIF-1α KO NK cells however, their numbers were significantly reduced. Loss of HIF-1 α did not affect NK cell proliferation during in vivo infection and in vitro cytokine stimulation. Instead, we found HIF-1α -deficient NK cells showed increased expression of the pro-apoptotic protein Bim and glucose metabolism was impaired during cytokine stimulation in vitro. Similarly, during MCMV infection HIF-1α -deficient NK cells upregulated Bim and had increased caspase activity. Thus, NK cells require HIF-1α-dependent metabolic functions to repress Bim expression and sustain cell numbers for an optimal virus response.
Data availability
Data generated or analyzed during this study has been deposited to the Dryad Digital Depository, available here: doi:10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rbvm
-
NK cell metabolic adaptation to infection promotes survival and viral clearanceDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.n5tb2rbvm.
-
HIF1α is required for NK cell metabolic adaptation during virus infectionhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (R35ES028365)
- Gary Patti
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (R01-AI131680)
- Wayne M Yokoyama
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Stipan Jonjic, University of Rijeka, Croatia
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All of the animals were handled according to approved institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) protocols (#20180293) of the University of Washington in St. Louis School of Medicine.
Version history
- Received: March 17, 2021
- Preprint posted: March 19, 2021 (view preprint)
- Accepted: August 11, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 16, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 23, 2021 (version 2)
- Version of Record updated: August 25, 2021 (version 3)
- Version of Record updated: August 27, 2021 (version 4)
Copyright
© 2021, Victorino et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,911
- Page views
-
- 305
- Downloads
-
- 12
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: Crossref, PubMed Central, Scopus.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Immunology and Inflammation
Anticancer treatments can result in various adverse effects, including infections due to immune suppression/dysregulation and drug-induced toxicity in the lung. One of the major opportunistic infections is Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (PCP), which can cause severe respiratory complications and high mortality rates. Cytotoxic drugs and immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) can induce interstitial lung diseases (ILDs). Nonetheless, the differentiation of these diseases can be difficult, and the pathogenic mechanisms of such diseases are not yet fully understood. To better comprehend the immunophenotypes, we conducted an exploratory mass cytometry analysis of immune cell subsets in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with PCP, cytotoxic drug-induced ILD (DI-ILD), and ICI-associated ILD (ICI-ILD) using two panels containing 64 markers. In PCP, we observed an expansion of the CD16+ T cell population, with the highest CD16+ T proportion in a fatal case. In ICI-ILD, we found an increase in CD57+ CD8+ T cells expressing immune checkpoints (TIGIT+ LAG3+ TIM-3+ PD-1+), FCRL5+ B cells, and CCR2+ CCR5+ CD14+ monocytes. These findings uncover the diverse immunophenotypes and possible pathomechanisms of cancer treatment-related pneumonitis.
-
- Developmental Biology
- Immunology and Inflammation
During embryogenesis, the fetal liver becomes the main hematopoietic organ, where stem and progenitor cells as well as immature and mature immune cells form an intricate cellular network. Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) reside in a specialized niche, which is essential for their proliferation and differentiation. However, the cellular and molecular determinants contributing to this fetal HSC niche remain largely unknown. Macrophages are the first differentiated hematopoietic cells found in the developing liver, where they are important for fetal erythropoiesis by promoting erythrocyte maturation and phagocytosing expelled nuclei. Yet, whether macrophages play a role in fetal hematopoiesis beyond serving as a niche for maturing erythroblasts remains elusive. Here, we investigate the heterogeneity of macrophage populations in the murine fetal liver to define their specific roles during hematopoiesis. Using a single-cell omics approach combined with spatial proteomics and genetic fate-mapping models, we found that fetal liver macrophages cluster into distinct yolk sac-derived subpopulations and that long-term HSCs are interacting preferentially with one of the macrophage subpopulations. Fetal livers lacking macrophages show a delay in erythropoiesis and have an increased number of granulocytes, which can be attributed to transcriptional reprogramming and altered differentiation potential of long-term HSCs. Together, our data provide a detailed map of fetal liver macrophage subpopulations and implicate macrophages as part of the fetal HSC niche.