Compartmentalized lymph node drainage dictates intestinal adaptive immune responses

Abstract

The intestinal immune system has the challenging task of tolerating foreign nutrients and the commensal microbiome, while excluding or eliminating ingested pathogens. Failure in such balance leads to a range of severe intestinal and systemic diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases, food allergies or invasive gastrointestinal infections. Multiple innate and adaptive immune mechanisms are therefore in place to maintain tissue integrity, including efficient peripheral generation of effector T (TH) cells and FOXP3+ regulatory T (pTreg) cells, which mediate resistance to pathogens and regulate excessive immune activation, respectively. The gut-draining mesenteric lymph nodes (mLNs) are critical sites for orchestrating adaptive immunity to luminal perturbations. However, how they manage to simultaneously support tolerogenic and inflammatory reactions is incompletely understood. Here we report that individual mLNs are anatomically and immunologically distinct according to the functional gut segment they drain. Dendritic cell gene signatures and adaptive T cell polarization against the same luminal antigen differed between mLNs along the intestine, the proximal small intestine-draining mLNs preferentially giving rise to tolerogenic and the distal mLNs to pro-inflammatory T cell responses. This compartmentalized dichotomy could be perturbed by duodenal infection, surgical removal of select distal mLNs, dysbiosis, or ectopic antigen delivery, impacting both lymphoid organ and tissue immune responses. Our findings reveal that the conflict between tolerogenic and inflammatory adaptive responses is in part resolved by discrete mLN drainage, and encourage gut segment-specific antigen targeting for therapeutic immune modulation.