RORγt-expressing dendritic cells are functionally versatile and evolutionarily conserved antigen-presenting cells

Hamsa Narasimhan, Maria L. Richter, Ramin Shakiba, Nikos E. Papaioannou, Christina Stehle, Kaushikk Ravi Rengarajan, Isabel Ulmert, Arek Kendirli, Clara de la Rosa, Pin-Yu Kuo, Abigail Altman, Philipp Münch, Saba Mahboubi  Vanessa Küntzel, Amina Sayed, Eva-Lena Stange, Jonas Pes, Alina Ulezko Antonova, Carlos-Filipe Pereira, Ludger Klein, Diana Dudziak, Marco Colonna, Natalia Torow, Mathias W. Hornef, Björn E. Clausen, Martin Kerschensteiner, Katharina Lahl, Chiara Romagnani, Maria Colomé-Tatché, and Barbara U. Schraml (2025 Feb 24) RORγt-expressing dendritic cells are functionally versatile and evolutionarily conserved antigen-presenting cells  PNAS 122 (9) e2417308122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.241730812. 

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Abstract cited directly from the article:

Conventional dendritic cells (cDCs) are potent antigen-presenting cells (APCs) that integrate signals from their environment allowing them to direct situation-adapted immunity. Thereby they harbor great potential for being targeted in vaccination, autoimmunity, and cancer. Here, we use fate mapping, functional analyses, and comparative cross-species transcriptomics to show that RORγt+ DCs are a conserved, functionally versatile, and transcriptionally distinct type of DCs. RORγt+ DCs entail various populations described in different contexts including Janus cells/RORγt-expressing extrathymic Aire-expressing cells (eTACs), subtypes of Thetis cells, RORγt+-DC (R-DC) like cells, cDC2C and ACY3+ DCs. We show that in response to inflammatory triggers, RORγt+ DCs can migrate to lymph nodes and in the spleen can activate naïve CD4+ T cells. These findings expand the functional repertoire of RORγt+ DCs beyond the known role of eTACs and Thetis cells in inducing T cell tolerance to self-antigens and intestinal microbes in mice. We further show that RORγt+ DCs with proinflammatory features accumulate in autoimmune neuroinflammation in mice and men. Thus, our work establishes RORγt+ DCs as immune sentinel cells that exhibit a broad functional spectrum ranging from inducing peripheral T cell tolerance to T cell activation depending on signals they integrate from their environment.