The RoRγt Decision

Friend or foe? It’s a decision our immune system must make millions of times per day. Get the choice wrong and risk letting a dangerous pathogen take hold. Even worse, perhaps, would be to attack our own tissues by mistake. To make the right call, cells called APCs take chemical fragments from potentially threatening molecules and meet with a defensive force of T-cells to 'double check' whether an immune response is necessary. Researchers find that waving through harmless food molecules through the intestines – an example of immune tolerance – requires special types of APC (highlighted in red and green) to meet with T-cells (blue and red) controlled by a protein called RORγt. Developing drugs to aid this communication, or restore RORγt in patients’ guts, might be the answer to calming food allergies and preventing unnecessary immune attacks leading to inflammatory bowel disease.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image provided by Dr. Gregory F. Sonnenberg. Re paper by Mengze Lyu & Gregory F. Sonnenberg
• Joan and Sanford I. Weill Department of Medicine, Division of Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with no restrictions equating to Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Journal of Experimental Medicine, April 2026