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Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Jul 21, 2016; 22(27): 6135-6144
Published online Jul 21, 2016. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v22.i27.6135
Role of NK, NKT cells and macrophages in liver transplantation
René Fahrner, Felix Dondorf, Michael Ardelt, Utz Settmacher, Falk Rauchfuss
René Fahrner, Felix Dondorf, Michael Ardelt, Utz Settmacher, Falk Rauchfuss, Department of General, Visceral and Vascular Surgery, Jena University Hospital, 07747 Jena, Germany
Author contributions: Fahrner R, Settmacher U and Rauchfuss F designed the review; Fahrner R, Dondorf F, Ardelt M and Rauchfuss F performed the review; Fahrner R, Settmacher U and Rauchfuss F analyzed the data; Fahrner R wrote the paper; and Dondorf F, Ardelt M, Settmacher U and Rauchfuss F revised the paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors have no conflicts of interest or financial ties to disclose.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Falk Rauchfuss, MD, MSc, Department of General, Visceral and Vascular Surgery, Jena University Hospital, Erlanger Allee 101, 07747 Jena, Germany. falk.rauchfuss@med.uni-jena.de
Telephone: +49-3641-9322601 Fax: +49-3641-9322602
Received: March 24, 2016
Peer-review started: March 24, 2016
First decision: May 12, 2016
Revised: May 25, 2016
Accepted: June 15, 2016
Article in press: June 15, 2016
Published online: July 21, 2016
Processing time: 113 Days and 9.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Liver transplantation has become the treatment of choice for acute or chronic liver disease. There are immunological differences between the liver and other organs. The specific features of selected hepatic immune cells, such as natural killer (NK), NKT and Kupffer cells, and their role in the mechanism of liver transplant rejection, tolerance and hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury are discussed in this review.