Relish the Thought and Channel Your Chloride, for Bacterial Clearance Depends on It.

Macrophage-mediated bacterial clearance relies on phagocytic uptake of the pathogen, subsequent phagolysosomal maturation, and microbial degradation. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Wong et al. (2017) report that a chloride transporter couples phagocytosis and bacterial clearance in an NF-κB-mediated feedforward loop, which is required for sustained pathogen uptake.