TNF and infection: Regarding bacterial infections and senescence, caveolin-1, has been reported to enhance the infection of Fusobacterium nucleatum in senescent gingival fibroblasts (Ahn et al., 2017) (Figure 3), and in the context of respiratory tract infections Streptococcus pneumoniae inflammation was associated with lung from aged mice that were in turn linked with an increase in senescence markers, such as p16, IL-1α/β, TNF-α, IL-6, and CXCL1, that coincided with an augmented expression of a S. pneumoniae ligand on the cell surface (Shivshankar et al., 2011) (Figure 3).