Pathology I: Immune System

I've got another picture from the book helping me out and will post it as today's pic of the day. The analogy I gave yesterday about the inner workings of the General Motors plant being messed with has more to do with a viral infection, when a virus overtakes the inner workings of a cell. This is known as Cellular Immunity, sometimes referred to as cell-mediated immunity.

Cellular Immunity is a type of adaptive immunity. When this happens the infected cell somewhat literally puts up red flags which poke out of the membrane of the cell which help tag the cell for destruction.

When it comes to protecting our system against foreign invaders we may consider two types of cells, B cells and T cells. These are two types of cells collectively known as Lymphocytes and are sometimes referred to as B Lymphocytes and T Lymphocytes.

They get their designation (B or T) based on where they grow up.

Cells that mature in the Bone marrow are called B cells

Cells that mature in the Tymus are called T cells

T-Cells are the cells that notice the red flags on the buildings and from what I've gathered, these red flags are literally pieces of protein derived from whatever virus has infected the cell.

With my GM analogy, we said that instructions were rewritten to replace the gas pedals with bubble gum. When someone inside the cell (or building) noticed this they took a piece of that bubble gum and stuck it out on the roof of the building as sort of a bubble gum flag and the ever present T-Lymphocytes (T cells) would notice the aberration and bring to light a host of fighters known as effector cells which would then destroy the building all together.

What are Effector Cells? The names of the cells that will destroy the building, so called because their ultimate effect is destruction of the building, the ultimate effect of the immune system.

Anyway, that's some of how it works with T-cells. T-cells deal with the cells in our body that have themselves been infected.

But, what if a microbe such as bacteria doesn't infect a cell but just causes problems outside of the cell. In our ongoing analogy this would be like vandals spray painting the side of the GM building or littering on the grounds or something like that.

Sometimes the police need help in distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys so, in order to be able to put the vandals in the police cars, the bad guys are tagged with antibodies. For whatever reason, the can't get bacterial microbes in their cars unless they are first tagged with an antibody.

In the accompanying picture, this scenario is on the left side of the picture under the heading of Humoral Immunity and Humoral Immunity is what the B cells do.

I'm going to have to fast-forward and get to learning the diseases associated with various aspects of the immune system. I'd like to learn everything well enough that I can talk about it and explain it myself but with so many classes that isn't always an option.

I need to pay attention to some of my other classes. Diversified would be a good one.

Out of all the lymphocytes in our bodies, B cells make up about 10-20% of lymphocytes while the T cells make up about 60-70% of our lymphocytes (Natural Killer cells make up an additional 10-15%)