Intestinal Tuft Cell Immune Privilege Enables Norovirus Persistence

To examine how tuft cells promote immune escape, investigators interrogated tuft cell interactions with CD8⁺ T cells by adoptively transferring just EGFP death inducing CD8⁺ T cells into Gfi1b-GFP tuft cell reporter mice. Investigators showed that intestinal tuft cells were relatively resistant to CD8⁺ T cells independent of norovirus infection, representing an immune-privileged niche that can be leveraged by enteric microbes.