Correlation between human natural killer cell migration and cytotoxicity.

• Main Authors: Chechet, Ksenia, Mickelin, Oscar
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Tillämpad fysik 2013
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-126487

Natural killer cells constitute part of the innate immune system, defending against cancer tumours and infections. Ongoing research has shown a diering e-ciency to kill target cells among individual cells in natural killer cell populations, and new tools allow for in-depth studies of large cell numbers over an extended period of time. In this thesis, the killing e-ciency of natural killer cells is correlated with their migration behaviour. Migratory properties are found to be of either of two essentially dierent forms, being active or inactive, and killing e-ciency is demonstrated to not be strongly related to migration behaviour. Further, natural killer cell populations are shown to exhibit additional heterogeneity as cells inducing fast death of target cells are shown to dier in migration compared to cells inducing slow death. Lastly, cells showing exhaustion in cytotoxicity during the assay are demonstrated to also experience migratory exhaustion.