St. Giles Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases, Rockefeller Branch, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY 10065, USA; Laboratory of Human Genetics of Infectious Diseases, Necker Branch, INSERM UMR 1163, Necker Hospital for Sick Children, 75015 Paris, France; Paris Descartes University, Imagine Institute, 75015 Paris, France; Pediatric Hematology-Immunology Unit, Necker Hospital for Sick Children, 75015 Paris, France; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York, NY 10065, USA. Electronic address: [Email]
Studies of vertebrate immunity have traditionally focused on professional cells, including circulating and tissue-resident leukocytes. Evidence that non-professional cells are also intrinsically essential (i.e. not via their effect on leukocytes) for protective immunity in natural conditions of infection has emerged from three lines of research in human genetics. First, studies of Mendelian resistance to infection have revealed an essential role of DARC-expressing erythrocytes in protection against Plasmodium vivax infection, and an essential role of FUT2-expressing intestinal epithelial cells for protection against norovirus and rotavirus infections. Second, studies of inborn errors of non-hematopoietic cell-extrinsic immunity have shown that APOL1 and complement cascade components secreted by hepatocytes are essential for protective immunity to trypanosome and pyogenic bacteria, respectively. Third, studies of inborn errors of non-hematopoietic cell-intrinsic immunity have suggested that keratinocytes, pulmonary epithelial cells, and cortical neurons are essential for tissue-specific protective immunity to human papillomaviruses, influenza virus, and herpes simplex virus, respectively. Various other types of genetic resistance or predisposition to infection in human populations are not readily explained by inborn variants of genes operating in leukocytes and may, therefore, involve defects in other cells. The probing of this unchartered territory by human genetics is reshaping immunology, by scaling immunity to infection up from the immune system to the whole organism.
