Function
The digestive tract is an important component of the body's immune system. In fact, the intestine possesses the largest mass of lymphoid tissue in the human body. The GALT is made up of several types of lymphoid tissue that store immune cells, such as T and B lymphocytes, that carry out attacks and defend against pathogens.
New research indicates that GALT may continue to be a major site of HIV activity, even if drug treatment has reduced HIV count in the peripheral blood.
Read more about this topic: Gut-associated Lymphoid Tissue
Famous quotes containing the word function:
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“As a medium of exchange,... worrying regulates intimacy, and it is often an appropriate response to ordinary demands that begin to feel excessive. But from a modernized Freudian view, worrying—as a reflex response to demand—never puts the self or the objects of its interest into question, and that is precisely its function in psychic life. It domesticates self-doubt.”
—Adam Phillips, British child psychoanalyst. “Worrying and Its Discontents,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, p. 58, Harvard University Press (1993)