Lecture 1
Introduction to the class Went over syllabus Student expectations
BSCI422 Immunology January 27, 2010
Lecture 2
Innate Immunity, the signal transduction and cytokine production When you’re exposed to a microbe, your body has innate immune responses that can kill the microbe right away, there is no recovery or memory period. It is the very first response. If you amount an affective innate immune response, you don't need to develop an adaptive immune response. In reality, most cases, you get infected and the innate immune responses deal with some of the microbe and those that survive go on to cause an infection and so immunological memory kicks in. You need innate immunity first. Innate immunity does two things: Kills the microbe right off the bat. Prevents any infection Or helps to generate an adaptive immune response
Characteristics: Recognize specific molecular patterns associated with pathogens, Pathogen associated molecular patterns (PAMPS). So the innate immune response is less specific than the adaptive immune response. It just recognizes general molecular patterns. This immunity is encoded in our germ line. The way we make T cell receptors by rearranging out DNA to have an infinite number of different antigenic specificity. We can recognize essentially anything. We all have the same receptors, they are wired to our genome. Example: Gram Negative Bacteria They have lipopolysaccaride on outer cleave and it is recognized by our innate immune response.
Where it all started: 1996 A fruit fly was killed by a fungi because it had no innate immunity. The molecule that fruit fly was lacking was called TOLL. This was the first evidence that the gene that contributed to the innate immune response was similar to a molecule in our own genes. In our bodies, they are referred to as TOLL Like Receptors (TLR). The signal transduction pathway was then developed in 2000. There are 11 TLRs. Each binds to