The Immune System in Evolution
Why and how our immune system functions and sometimes dysfunctions? Immunologists are often surprised by the complexity of the human immune system’s performance. A brief exploration of the evolutionary history of the immune system might be able to provide
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The Immune System in Evolution Buqing Yi, Manfred Thiel, and Alexander Choukèr
Why and how our immune system functions and sometimes dysfunctions? Immunologists are often surprised by the complexity of the human immune system’s performance. A brief exploration of the evolutionary history of the immune system might be able to provide insight for understanding this complexity of our important defense system and its role for human health. Human immunity works through a complex, orchestrated, and many functional and organ-specific, though always interconnected, approaches. As from the evolution from simple organisms - as known especially from insects with a short life time (e.g. fruit fly) - to highly developed mammals, we know that two major immune system branches have evolved subsequently as a consequence of expanded life times and environmental challenges, the innate immunity and adaptive immunity. The coordinated efforts of the innate and adaptive immune branches normally guarantee an effective host defense against potentially harmful pathogens, to differentiate immune answers between self and nonself and hereby avoiding to harm the host. Innate immunity is the primary line of immune defense and yields an immediate nonspecific response, which is mediated mainly by neutrophils, monocytes, macrophages, dendritic cells (DCs), and natural killer (NK) cells, together with cytokines, defensins, and complement and acute phase reactants such as C-reactive protein (Akira et al. 2006; Medzhitov and Janeway 1997). Adaptive immunity, the so-called secondary line of defense, relies upon B and T lymphocytes which express antigenspecific surface receptors. There are two key components of the adaptive immune
B. Yi • A. Choukèr (*) Department of Anesthesiology, Hospital of the University of Munich, Marchioninistr. 15, 81377 Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Thiel Anesthesiology and Intensive Care, University of Heidelberg, University Hospital Mannheim Theodor-Kutzer-Ufer 1-3, 68167 Mannheim, Germany
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Choukèr, O. Ullrich, The Immune System in Space: Are we prepared?, SpringerBriefs in Space Life Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41466-9_1
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