ArticleImmunity2017
A Tunable Diffusion-Consumption Mechanism of Cytokine Propagation Enables Plasticity in Cell-to-Cell Communication in the Immune System.
Article in Immunity, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 135 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
135 citing papers in PubMed.
- Subclinical inflammation and early pathogenesis of rheumatic diseases: mechanistic insights relevant to primary care.Irish journal of medical science · 2026Review
- Spatial Integration of Protein and Chromosomal States Reveals Early Copy-Number Changes and Genotype-Associated Immune Neighborhoods in Serous Ovarian Cancer Evolution.Cancer discovery · 2026Article
- Isotype-switched antibodies originating from tertiary lymphoid structures can antagonize ovarian cancer progression.iScience · 2026Article
- Mathematical and Mouse Models Identify Regulatory T Cell Influx as A Key Determinant of Acquired Resistance to PD-1 Immunotherapy.Cancer research · 2026Article
- Cerebrovascular vulnerability and fibrosis in human brain aneurysms.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Decoding cellular population dynamics through mechanistic modelling and statistical data analysis.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Review
- Excitability as a design principle in the immune system.Science advances · 2026Article
- Beyond the chaos: How architecture structures tumour biology.The FEBS journal · 2026Review
- Design principles of the cytotoxic CD8Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Spatial instruction of tissue immunity.ImmunoHorizons · 2026Review
- Computational Modeling of Cellular Influence Delineates Functionally Relevant and Distinct Cellular Neighborhoods in Primary and Metastatic Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma.Cancer immunology research · 2026Article
- Spatially structured inflammatory response in the presence of a uniform stimulus.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Spherical Nucleic Acids: Turning Synthetic Advances and Fundamental Discovery into Translational Breakthroughs in Chemistry, Materials Development, Biology, and Medicine.Accounts of chemical research · 2026Article
- Spatial microenvironments tune immune response dynamics in the Drosophila larval fat body.PLoS genetics · 2026Article
- Temporal tissue dynamics from a spatial snapshot.Nature · 2026Article
- Electrical signalling beyond diffusion-limited microbial interactions.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- Oscillatory dynamics as the coordination layer of the organism: waves, Markov blankets, and the virtual space of cognition.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Cell populations in human breast cancers are molecularly and biologically distinct with age.Nature aging · 2025Article
- Dynamics and variegation in the Treg response to Interleukin-2.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Bridging single cells to organs: Mesoscale modules as fundamental units of tissue function.Cell · 2025Review
75 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Immune cells communicate by exchanging cytokines to achieve a context-appropriate response, but the distances over which such communication happens are not known. Here, we used theoretical considerations and experimental models of immune responses in vitro and in vivo to quantify the spatial extent of cytokine communications in dense tissues. We established that competition between cytokine diffusion and consumption generated spatial niches of high cytokine concentrations with sharp boundaries. The size of these self-assembled niches scaled with the density of cytokine-consuming cells, a parameter that gets tuned during immune responses. In vivo, we measured interactions on length scales of 80-120 μm, which resulted in a high degree of cell-to-cell variance in cytokine exposure. Such heterogeneous distributions of cytokines were a source of non-genetic cell-to-cell variability that is often overlooked in single-cell studies. Our findings thus provide a basis for understanding variability in the patterning of immune responses by diffusible factors.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.