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Vaccination saves millions of lives
According to the WHO, vaccination saves 2-3 million lives a year (1). It is a form of active immunisation; it means that vaccine is injected into your body to activate and boost your immune response. (Note: passive immunisation is the administration of antibodies -...
Innate Immune Memory
Immune memory, the ability to remember previous infections, has always been a discipline of the adaptive immune system, or so we learnt in high school. However, articles that describe immune memory of the innate immune system have appeared more often these...
Innate Immune System
Every day, our bodies encounter millions of pathogens. In a single day, humans inhale about 12 million bacteria and viruses (1). In addition to mechanical (e.g. skin or tears) and chemical (e.g. low pH in stomach) barriers, our immune system protects us from...
Endogenous Retroviruses as Switchers of the Immune Response to Microbiome
#articleofthemonth The article published in 2021 by the group of Professor Yasmine Belkaid (1) got me excited! So, I will introduce it to you as #articleofthemonth. Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), which are included in mammalian and human DNA, have many more...
Basic Principles in Immunology
On what principles does the immune system work? My PhD exam and Dr. Dominik Filipp's Innate Immunity lecture at the Faculty of Science, UK (highly recommended) led me to articles on concepts or also called principles in immunology. I was actually familiar with them...
Endogenous Retroviruses
Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are short DNA sequences within our genome. Originally, these sequences were the genetic information of viruses that repeatedly infected our cells (1). Over several million years, thousands to hundreds of thousands of HERV...
The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology
Compared to other sciences, molecular biology is relatively young. Its "birth" can be associated with the research of Johann Gregor Mendel, who published a study on the inheritance in peas in 1865. The discovery of DNA - called nuclein in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher...