Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0029713 (immaturity)
 4,335 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Neonates and infants, due to the immaturity in their adaptive immunity, are thought to depend largely on the innate immune system for protection against bacterial infection. However, the innate immunity-mediated antimicrobial response in neonates and infants is incompletely characterized. Here, we report that infant mice were more susceptible to microbial sepsis than adult mice, with significantly reduced bacterial clearance from the circulation and visceral organs. Infant PMNs exhibited less constitutive expression of the chemokine receptor CXCR2, and bacterial infection caused further reduction of PMN CXCR2 in infant mice compared with adult mice. This correlates with diminished in vitro chemotaxis of infant PMNs toward the chemoattractant CXCL2 and impaired in vivo recruitment of infant PMNs into the infectious site. Furthermore, consistent with the reduced antimicrobial response in vivo, infant macrophages displayed an impaired bactericidal activity with a defect in phagosome maturation after ingestion of either gram-positive or gram-negative bacteria. Thus, infant mice exhibit an increased vulnerability to microbial infection with delayed bacterial clearance, which is associated with the inefficiency in their innate phagocyte-associated antimicrobial functions characterized by defects in PMN recruitment and macrophage phagosome maturation during microbial sepsis.
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PMID:Inefficient antimicrobial functions of innate phagocytes render infant mice more susceptible to bacterial infection. 2340 83

Human milk, the best food for infants, is a dynamic and complex fluid that directly influences the immune system and microbiota establishment. The protective role of human milk is well known although the mechanisms behind it still need to be uncovered. This study aimed to characterize the impact of human milk in the immature intestine of newborns by analyzing the global transcriptomic response of the FHs 74 int cell line (ATCC CCL-241). The expression of intestinal keratins and other genes with a well-annotated intestinal or epithelial function validated FHs 74 int derived from the fetal small intestine as a model of the intestinal epithelium of newborns. Cells exposed to skimmed human milk showed seventeen differentially expressed genes, most of them up-regulated, including four chemokine genes (CXCL1, CXCL2, CXCL3 and CXCL10) and other immune-related genes. qRT-PCR and ELISA analysis confirmed the microarray data and indicated a different pattern of expression upon milk exposure in FHs 74 int as compared to the adult tumorigenic Caco-2 cell line. The evaluation of the functional significance of these transcriptomic changes reveals that human milk exposure may contribute to the regulation of the inflammatory response in the intestine during the perinatal period, which is characterized by the immaturity of the immune system and a pro-inflammatory phenotype.
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PMID:Impact of human milk on the transcriptomic response of fetal intestinal epithelial cells reveals expression changes of immune-related genes. 3049 75