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See How Tough Your Immune System is With "Blood Wars"
Thanks to a new art/science exhibition called "Blood Wars," you can find out whose dad has the toughest immune system once and for all. The brainchild of artist Kathy High, "Blood Wars" pits white blood cells from two different people against each other. From the article: "In order to create the blood duel, High gets a phlebotomist to take blood samples from two different people. She then separates the white blood cells from the rest of the blood and stains them using different colors. They are then placed in a Petri dish and their interactions are filmed under a microscope using time-lapse microscopy. The cellular 'winner' of each round will go onto fight another participant."
This comes as a weird time for me, as I just a month ago got an autoimmune attack in my system. That is when your own system starts attacking itself thinking theres an enemy. It's usually unknown where or why it hits a person, but I probably got it from some food in south east asia. End result - now 1,5 months in hospital and unable to walk. Doctors aren't yet completely sure what it is, but they're thinking it's Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Human blood cells attacking itself is some nasty bug. At least my legs and hands still work little bit so I will be able to recover.
i wonder if you can retrieve the ultimate winner cells (your cells) and it will boost your immune system? where is the database stored so the cells know which foreign cells to go after, is it the white cells itself or a chemical reaction?
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
on facebook. duh.
don't forget to spam everyone's news feed with "join my blood in blood wars!"
It doesn't quite work that way, but the answer to your question is that the database is stored in the DNA of immune cells.
Essentially, the newborn cells of the adaptive immune system (B and T-cells) undergo rearrangements of their DNA to produce a incredibly wide variety of receptors.
Then, they go through a selection process - if they react strongly with self, they die (negative selection). After a few more maturation and selection steps, the surviving immune cells are sent throughout the body.
If one of them later binds strongly to something (which is presumably foreign) in the right context, they activate. They trigger an immune response and proliferate. A subset of these daughter cells become essentially immortal - outlasting the immune response they fought in, but ready to quickly mobilize should that foreign substance be encountered again.
So, the memory cells are the hardware, but the rearranged antigen receptor gene they harbor is the information they need to work.
Geeze, what kind of geeks read slashdot these days?
Realms fans, cutter.
I meant she should label the Petri dishes, but I spoke too quickly. I reread it and she mixed up both cells in the same Petri dish.
Of course she did that. It's quite hard for white blood cells to fight each other if you put each of them in their own petri dish.
White blood cells generally are unable to use ranged weapons to their full effectiveness.