IF THE body fails to dispose of dead cells, the immune system moves
in—and may acquire a taste for healthy tissue. That could be how the
autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus develops, says Tarik
Möröy of the Institute for Cell Biology in Essen, Germany.
Lupus, whose symptoms include rashes and kidney problems, affects over a
million people in the US alone. One of the genes implicated in lupus codes for
Dnase1, an enzyme that breaks down nuclear material in dead cells. To confirm
its role, Möröy and his colleagues disabled the gene in mice. The mice…
