A spoonful of sugar helps lymphoma cells go up

Abstract

In this issue of Blood, Schneider et al1 document that sugar moieties, introduced into surface-membrane immunoglobulin (smIg) antigen-binding sites on follicular lymphoma (FL) cells by somatic hypermutation (SHM), induce smIg-mediated signals in a distinct, nonstandard manner. This signaling results from the sugar physically interacting with sugar-specific lectins from bacteria. The findings confirm and support the clinical relevance of previous observations about SHM introducing glycans into the variable domains of FL antigen-binding sites,2-5 and they support the potential importance of microbial exposure to lymphomagenesis and disease progression.