You Are What You Eat: Linking Metabolic Asymmetry and Cell Fate Choice.

To defend against pathogens, activated immune cells must rapidly produce diverse lymphocyte subtypes. In a recent report in Nature, Verbist et al. (2016) describe how a regulatory loop acting between metabolic and transcriptional programs, centered around the asymmetric cell division machinery and the proto-oncogene c-Myc, establishes distinct T cell fates.