Editorial

We begin another year much as the last, but with continued momentum. As we noted in last year's comments, our goal is to provide review articles that furnish new perspectives to bridge the gap between basic immunology and clinical application. Our particular focus is to arrange reviews covering specific application of research in basic mechanisms to the understanding of complex clinical diseases, and to highlight areas in which studies in other biomedical topics have major significance to basic and clinical immunology mechanisms. The article in this first issue of our third year illustrates these goals emphatically! I will begin by highlighting two articles that start with the cutting edge research in basic immune mechanisms and then go all the way to bridging the gap toward direct application to clinical medicine. The article by Alber and Kamradt on the most recently described Th17 subset shows how new discoveries in basic cellular immunology have direct application in elucidating clinical disease mechanisms. Similarly, the article by La Motte-Mohs, Awong and Zuniga-Pflucker shows the development of a model of the most fundamental lymphocyte developmental pathway - T lymphocyte differentiation - might be exploited for the production of lymphocytes in vitro for clinical applications. Also in this issue are the articles that impart essential mechanistic information on host response and disease pathogenesis. Gomez et al. provide us with new information on how the signal transduction mechanism changes become evident in aging immune systems. Santos et al. give us some interesting insights into how the different roles of dendritic cells can have a profound impact on the nature of immune responses in response to mycobacterium, and subsequent clinical disease. Jacobs et al. also provide us with important information on various mechanisms associated with dendritic cells in both innate and adaptive immunity. Finally, molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis are elucidated in articles by De Bruyne et al., who summarizes some important interactions between myeloma cells and stromal cells in the bone marrow, and Ying et al., who presents interesting details on how Chlamydia has been able to override basic cell mechanisms in the regulation of cell survival and death during infection. Thus, our journal is in full stride, providing an important forum for articles presenting critical information on molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis in immune mediated diseases and host response. We are grateful for the impressive contributions from our authors, and we encourage continued support from our readers and contributors.