The paper by SEU was appraised as "Cell Best of 2020"

Recently, the best papers of 2020 in the three major journals of Cell, Nature and Science have all been released. Among them, the research paper titled “Stress-Induced Metabolic Disorder in Peripheral CD4+ T Cells Leads to Anxiety-like Behavior” published by the research team led by Prof. Jin Jin from Zhejiang University and Prof. Chai Renjie from Southeast University in CELL was appraised as the best paper of 2020 CELL Journal and included in the Cell Best of 2020 Collection (a total of only 9 Cell Best Papers of the Year are included). Among the best papers of the year in the three major CNS journals in 2020, 4 papers are related to the brain science and this paper is the only selected paper that was independently completed by Chinese scholars in this field.

The research results determined how chronic stress would affect the mitochondrial morphology of peripheral CD4+ T cells, and clarified the specific role of a kind of peripheral T cells in anxiety-like behavior as induced by the chronic stress. Studies have found that the mice lacking CD4+ T cells in their bodies can avoid mental illness induced by chronic stress under external pressure. The clinical evidences collected by Prof. Chai Renjie’s research team from Nanjing Gulou Hospital also showed that the serum xanthine levels of anxiety sufferers were higher than those engaged in the group of healthy control. Excessive purines produced by T cells would enter the brain through blood circulation, and then bind to the adenosine receptor A1 on the oligodendrocytes in the amygdala on the left side of the brain, causing activation and proliferation of oligodendrocytes, and then over-activating neurons in the left amygdala, which would further cause anxiety symptoms. But after specifically knocking out the receptor A1 in oligodendrocytes, the symptoms of anxious mice recovered significantly, which verified the above conclusion.