ABOVE: THE SCIENTIST STAFF
University of Chicago immunologist Cathryn Nagler began to suspect that the body’s resident bacteria play a role in food allergies almost two decades ago. A handful of studies of germfree mice in the 1980s and ’90s had suggested that bacteria in the gut, or compounds they produce, such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), are important in teaching the immune system not to overreact to the foods we eat. But it was a new mouse model of peanut allergy, developed by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in 2000, that really made Nagler think about whether the gut microbiome might be involved in how humans respond to dietary antigens.
The mouse strain they used, C3H/HeJ, carried a mutation in the toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4). This protein had recently been shown to mediate immune responses triggered by a bacterial antigen known as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), and the ...
