Functions
Adaptive immunity is triggered in vertebrates when a pathogen evades the innate immune system and generates a threshold level of antigen.
The major functions of the adaptive immune system include:
- the recognition of specific “non-self” antigens in the presence of “self”, during the process of antigen presentation.
- the generation of responses that are tailored to maximally eliminate specific pathogens or pathogen infected cells.
- the development of immunological memory, in which each pathogen is “remembered” by a signature antibody. These memory cells can be called upon to quickly eliminate a pathogen should subsequent infections occur.
Read more about this topic: Adaptive Immune System
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)