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Natural killer cells and pregnancy

Ashley Moffett-King1

  • 1Department of Pathology, Cambridge University, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1QP, UK. am485@cam.ac.uk

Nature Reviews. Immunology
|September 5, 2002
PubMed

The fetus is considered to be an allograft that, paradoxically, survives pregnancy despite the laws of classical transplantation immunology. There is no direct contact of the mother with the embryo, only with the extraembryonic placenta as it implants in the uterus. No convincing evidence of uterine maternal T-cell recognition of placental trophoblast cells has been found, but instead, there might be maternal allorecognition mediated by uterine natural killer cells that recognize unusual fetal trophoblast MHC ligands.

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