Ed Palmer

University of Basel, Switzerland

Email: Ed.Palmer@unibas.ch

Phone number: +41 61 265 3120

Fax number: +4161 265 34 20

http://www.dfbs.ch

Professor of Experimental Transplantation Immunology, Departments of Research and Nephrology, University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland.

Affiliate description:

The Laboratory for Transplantation Immunology at the University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland is led by Professor Ed Palmer and focuses on the biology of T lymphocytes. How the thymus establishes a T cell repertoire that is self-tolerant is one of the major research themes in the laboratory. Over the last several years, this laboratory has made a number of original and important discoveries in how thymocytes are selected to be tolerant of self. Prof. Palmer’s laboratory identified mouse mammary tumor antigens as the source of endogenous superantigens and has identified a number of conserved features of  TCR that are critical for decoding positive and negative selection signals. The laboratory is also interested in the T cell response to transplantation antigens and has an active program in understanding transplantation rejection and tolerance.

Five Key Publications:

1. Palmer, E. Negative selection:
Clearing out the bad apples from the T cell repertoire.
Nature Reviews Immunology 2003; 3: 383-391.

2. Werlen, G., Hausmann, B.T., Naeher, D. and Palmer, E.
Life and death decisions in the thymus: Timing is everything. Science 2003; 199: 1859-63.

3. Werlen, G., Hausmann, B. and Palmer, E. A motif within the 
T cell receptor controls positive selection by modulating the ERK pathway,
Nature 2000; 406: 422-426.

4. Bäckström, B.T., Müller, U., Hausmann, B.T. and Palmer, E.
Positive selection through a motif in the  T cell receptor.
Science 1998; 281: 835-8.

5. S. Zuklys, G. Balciunaite, A. Agarwal, E. Palmer, P. Naquet, G. Holländer.
Differential thymic transcription of aire, the gene defective in the monogenic autosomal recessive autoimmune disease APECED.
J. Immunology 2000, 165: 1976-1983.