Professor Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio, United States
Disclosure(s):
Kyle C. McKenna, PhD: No financial relationships to disclose
Introduction/Rationale: The field of immunology is of great interest to undergraduate students.
Methods: The “Pillar of Immunology” article, “Cutting Edge: Toll-Like Receptor 4 (TLR4)-Deficient Mice are Hyporesponsive to Lipopolysaccharide: Evidence for TLR4 as the Lps Gene Product” by Hoshino, K. et al. (J. Immunol. 1999: 162:3749-3752) was employed to solidify the concept of innate immune cell recognition of pathogen associated molecular patterns by pattern recognition receptors.
Results: Strengths of the article for teaching included its brevity of four pages with only four figures which was less intimidating to undergraduates unfamiliar with reading scientific manuscripts. The article exposed students to critical experimental immunological techniques including flow cytometry and ELISA and demonstrated the tremendous utility of gene-knockout mice. The demonstration of a loss of function point mutation in the TLR4 locus of C3H/HeJ mice highlighted how single-nucleotide polymorphisms can alter normal physiology, and reinforced concepts of protein synthesis from mRNA expression of genes in DNA. The review, “TLR4: The Winding Road to the Discovery of the LPS Receptor by Murdock and Nunez (J. Immunol. 2016; 197:2561-2562) created excitement for scientific enquiry as it described the quest of the research groups of Shizuo Akira and Bruce Beutler to identify TLR4 as the LPS receptor.
Conclusion: This “Pillars of Immunology” article and its review were excellent for teaching fundamental concepts of cellular and molecular immunology to senior level undergraduates in a 15-week immunology course.
