Innate Immune Response Essay

1. As a child, you decide to ignore your mother’s advice and walk in a construction area bare-foot. To your chagrin, you step on a rusty nail and sustain a localized infection. Please describe, in detail, the immune response that develops (both innate and adaptive) after this injury. You may include flowcharts and sketches, if it is helpful. (15 pts) There are three parts of the immune system that consist of the body’s natural barriers, the innate immune response and the adaptive immune response. The skin and mucosal surfaces form barriers against infection. When bacteria enters through a break in the natural barrier of the skin, it is first introduced to antimicrobial peptides under the surface of the skin that is supposed to kill bacteria,

If a person has an immunodeficiency, the innate immune response helps to slow the spread of infection while calling on white blood cells, also known as lymphocytes,

The adaptive immune response adapts to the infecting pathogen. For adaptive immunity, there is a difference in the way lymphocytes recognize pathogens. During infection, only lymphocytes that have receptors that recognize that specific pathogen are selected to participate in the adaptive immune response. These pathogen-specific lymphocytes then undergo what is called clonal selection and expansion to proliferate and differentiate to become effector lymphocytes. Some lymphocytes selected during the adaptive immune response provides long term immunological memory to prevent later infection from the same pathogen, consequently eliciting a stronger and faster response. The adaptive immune response includes lymphocytes that go through clonal selection and expansion. This is because only cells with receptors for the specific pathogen that causes infection will be selected to play a role in the adaptive immune response. While dendritic cells focus on activating naive T-cells, macrophages are responsible for removing pathogen and their breakdown products from the afferent lymph that arrives from the site of infection. The macrophage-mediated lymph filtration is as critical as it efficient because it prevents infectious