Acetylcholine-producing T cells in the intestine regulate antimicrobial peptide expression and microbial diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway reduces systemic tumor necrosis factor (TNF) via acetylcholine-producing memory T cells in the spleen. These choline acetyltransferase (ChAT)-expressing T cells are also found in the intestine, where their function is unclear. We aimed to characterize these cells in mouse and human intestine and delineate their function. We made use of the ChAT-enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) reporter mice. CD4 Cre mice were crossed to ChAT fl/fl mice to achieve specific deletion of ChAT in CD4 + T cells. We observed that the majority of ChAT-expressing T cells in the human and mouse intestine have characteristics of Th17 cells and coexpress IL17A, IL22, and RORC. The generation of ChAT-expressing T cells was skewed by dendritic cells after activation of their adrenergic receptor β 2 . To evaluate ChAT T cell function, we generated CD4-specific ChAT-deficient mice. CD4ChAT −/− mice showed a reduced level of epithelial antimicrobial peptides lysozyme, defensin A, and ang4, which was associated with an enhanced bacterial diversity and richness in the small intestinal lumen in CD4ChAT −/− mice. We conclude that ChAT-expressing T cells in the gut are stimulated by adrenergic receptor activation on dendritic cells. ChAT-expressing T cells may function to mediate the host AMP secretion, microbial growth and expansion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".