Macrophages form dendrite-like pseudopods to enhance bacterial ingestion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Macrophages are critical innate immune cells that exhibit remarkable adaptability during pathogen infections. However, the relationship between their morphological plasticity and physiological functions remains largely elusive. Here, we discovered an unprecedented paradigm of macrophage adaptation within a few hours upon severe Gram-negative bacterial infections, characterized by the formation of dendrite-like pseudopods (DLPs). Using in vitro, microfluidic, and in vivo infection models, we demonstrate that these pseudopods enhance bacterial uptake by expanding the macrophage searching radius, thereby bolstering host defense. Mechanistically, Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) activation by Gram-negative bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) upregulates the expression of macrophage-specific RhoGEF and ARHGEF3 in an NF-κB-dependent manner. ARHGEF3 localizes to dendrite-like pseudopods and enhances RhoA activity. Consequently, periodic cycles of actin assembly and disassembly propel the elongation of pseudopods, whereas vimentin intermediate filaments stabilize them. Importantly, infusion of DLP-equipped macrophages into Salmonella-infected mice reduced bacterial burden and infection severity. Together, our findings underscore how the dynamic response of macrophages to massive infections can augment immune defense against pathogenic bacteria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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".