The immune system as a social network

The immune system employs a multitude of molecules, cells and organs that act together throughout the entire body to guard human health. Much like in a social network, immune cells can exert full functionality only through effective collaboration and communication. In this brief News & Views article we highlight a publication by Rieckmann and colleagues presenting a map of this interplay that is unprecedented both in scale and level of detail. We discuss the analogy between the immune systems and a social network.

NATURE IMMUNOLOGY (2017)
doi.org/10.1038/ni.3727 [pdf]