Figures
Five-week-old juvenile gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) in a hollow tree in Kirindy Forest, Western Madagascar.
Lemurs are the most distantly related non-human primates. A Research Article by Anne Averdam and colleagues in this issue of PLoS Genetics (see Averdam et al., 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000688) shows that lemurs differ considerably from "higher" primates in receptors of natural killer (NK) cells and their ligands. Instead of KIR or Ly49 genes, lemurs substantially expanded and diversified CD94/NKG2 receptors. Remarkably, this novel system of polymorphic and diverse receptors points to combinatorial diversity as a mechanism to increase the NK cell receptor repertoire of lemurs, a finding that was previously unknown for NK cells.
Image Credit: Manfred Eberle, www.phocus.org (German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Germany)
Citation: (2009) PLoS Genetics Issue Image | Vol. 5(10) October 2009. PLoS Genet 5(10): ev05.i10. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pgen.v05.i10
Published: October 30, 2009
Copyright: © 2009 Manfred Eberle. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Lemurs are the most distantly related non-human primates. A Research Article by Anne Averdam and colleagues in this issue of PLoS Genetics (see Averdam et al., 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000688) shows that lemurs differ considerably from "higher" primates in receptors of natural killer (NK) cells and their ligands. Instead of KIR or Ly49 genes, lemurs substantially expanded and diversified CD94/NKG2 receptors. Remarkably, this novel system of polymorphic and diverse receptors points to combinatorial diversity as a mechanism to increase the NK cell receptor repertoire of lemurs, a finding that was previously unknown for NK cells.
Image Credit: Manfred Eberle, www.phocus.org (German Primate Center - Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Germany)