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All together now
beyond inflammation and cell-signalling. But oxylipins are found across the kingdoms of life. Plants, lacking mobile immune cells flowing round a bloodstream, have a very different way of responding to injury, producing a wide array of bactericidal,...
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A giant leap for bioscience
include bone and muscle loss, decreased cardiovascular capacity, defects in wound and bone fracture healing, and impaired immune function. Crucially, space also causes cells to grow and age much faster than they would on Earth, enabling scientists to...
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Focus on...Allergies
the last 30 years[1]. What is an allergy? Allergies occur when the body treats a harmless substance as a threat and the immune system produces an unnecessary response to it. In biomedical terms, it is an inappropriate immune response to a particular...
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The Logic of Immunity: Deciphering an Enigma
medical and biomedical students often struggle to understand, yet they must master it to value the power of the human immune system. How to make immunology more accessible to undergraduates has vexed generations of medical and life science educators. In...
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British Society for Immunology
The British Society for Immunology (BSI) represents scientists and doctors who study the immune system. BSI aims to ensure that the public benefits from the successes of immunology by communicating with and inspiring a wide range of audiences. BSI...
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Conflicting ideas
actually the things that curbed the selfishness. That was the breakthrough really – that the proteins were actinglike an immune system to suppress the selfish centromeric DNA parasite. It was an almost heretical concept at the time because these two are...
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Conflicting ideas
actually the things that curbed the selfishness. That was the breakthrough really – that the proteins were actinglike an immune system to suppress the selfish centromeric DNA parasite. It was an almost heretical concept at the time because these two are...
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The road to replacement
Newland from Cardiff University was highly commended for his ex vivo model of multiple sclerosis (MS). As MS develops, the immune system degrades the myelin protein that surrounds neurons, forming gaps in the brain called focal lesions. This process can...
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Serpent solutions
which is made by exposing horses or other large animals including sheep and goats to selected snake venoms and allowing an immune response to occur. Blood can then be taken from the animals and centrifuged to collect the antibodies for the development...
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If you go down to the woods today...
of the bite, the tick uses a muscular pump to drink the blood. Tick saliva also includes chemicals to suppress the host’s immune system, prevent blood clotting, break down tissue and help blood to pool under the surface of the skin. When the host’s...
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"The wave has only got bigger"
had postulated that these curious sequences, which had come to be called CRISPR, might be some kind of RNA-based adaptive immune system, although nobody at the time had any experimental evidence of that. Crucially Jill had the insight that these systems...
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"The wave has only got bigger"
had postulated that these curious sequences, which had come to be called CRISPR, might be some kind of RNA-based adaptive immune system, although nobody at the time had any experimental evidence of that. Crucially Jill had the insight that these systems...
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Why an oral vaccine could be key to fighting COVID-19
be up to 21-28 days, and some of the other vaccines in development require multiple doses before you have gained sufficient immune protection. So you’re talking about lining up millions of people outside however many vaccine facilities you've got, and...
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Trials of a sperm
reproductive tract is a remarkably hostile environment for sperm. On entrance, they are treated as foreign bodies by the immune system and face aggressive attack. The female then proceeds to whittle down the surviving few, preventing too many sperm...
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Sport
and recovery from injury. For example biologists have linked high-intensity endurance exercise to a reduction in immune system function leading in an increase of cold and flu infections. This is important information for athletes who complete in events...
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A Golden Opportunity
die within 12 months of losing their sight[1,2]. Even more shocking is that the deficiency leads to nutritionally acquired immune deficiency[3]. Consequently, providing vitamin A to all children in undernourished settings could prevent an estimated...
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The Compatibility Gene
agony prompted Medwar to study transplants. He went on to show that transplant rejection was the result of a reaction from immune cells, and in 1960 he won the Nobel prize. This is the first story that Davis shares, followed by many others of scientists...
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Reports
not develop until the end of the 2nd trimester. Due to their transparency, Zebrafish and the use of fluorescently tagged immune cells have been used to visualise the immune response, and Professor Martin showed us some amazing videos of macrophages...
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The Big Biology Breakthroughs of 2017
first CAR T-cell-based cancer therapy, opening the way for a new generation of therapies that modify individuals' own immune cells to fight disease. The so-called 'living therapy', marketed as Kymriah, works against acute lymphoblastic leukaemia....
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The Beautiful Cure: Harnessing your Body's Natural Defences
writer by night. That he is successful at moonlighting is evidenced by this excellent primer on the intricacies of the immune response, his sequel to 2014's well-received The Compatibility Gene. His first book focused on the cluster of genes comprising...
