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assignment comments

Submitted by cdkelly on Tue, 10/30/2018 - 19:59

 

There needs to be an extremely diverse collection of immune system components on T cells and B cells because they have to be prepared to deal with the huge variety of foreign molecules that can get into the body. They recognize anything that is not "self" and mark them for destruction. The different immune system cells need to be trained to not target normally functioning cells within the body.

A new cutting-edge method for targeting cancer is to create an antibody based of the composure of the tumor and create a corresponding T cell receptor that targets it. This allows the immune system to continually target the tumor rather than using a drug to disable a specific part of a pathway. This method allows for oncogene addiction to be dealt with and furthers the likelihood of remission.

Recombinase has to take into account the DNA sequence of the invader and make a copy of it for the purpose of identification. These signal sequences must be extremely specific because if they are not, then the wrong molecules could be targeted by the immune system and lead to an autoimmune disorder. The immune system could target our own cells and cause a number of bad symptoms.

This makes sense because the sheer quantity of pathogens and foreign invader molecules that a given person can encounter is massive. Therefore, because the V(D)J recombination allows for so much variability in the antigen-binding region, all of these different possibilities can be taken care of by the immune system. Even the pathogens that mutate rapidly because it can respond to these changes.

 

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