Lisbon Portugal: A new study led by Bruno Silva Santos, group leader and vice-director at the Instituto de Medicina Molecular Joo Lobo Antunes (iMM; Portugal), and published in the scientific journal Cell Reports discovered that T cells influence the transfer of maternal microbiota during birth and nursing, as well as the lung immune response in newborns. Before birth, the lungs are filled with a sterile liquid that is replaced by gas in the first breath after birth, which causes an immune reaction involving substantial lung tissue remodelling, called the "first breath response". Now, researchers at iMM implicated a specific type of immune cells, gd T cells, in this immune response in mice.
