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Chapter category: Immunology

Complement Receptors, Adhesion, and Phagocytosis

This chapter appears in the following book:

Molecular Mechanisms of Phagocytosis

Edited by: Carlos Rosales
ISBN: 0-387-25419-6
» Get more information about this book at landesbioscience.com «

Chapter authors:
Eric Brown


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Recognition of potential pathogens by host cells involved in their destruction is the initial step in generation of sterilizing immunity after epithelial barriers have been penetrated by disease-causing bacteria, viruses, and eukaryotes. One mechanism for recognition is that professional phagocytes express plasma membrane receptors for pathogen molecules, the pathogen-associated molecular patterns, or PAMPS. However, the recognition mechanism is potentially “leaky” because of the selection pressure on pathogens to evolve alterations in their surface structures that allow them to escape direct recognition. As a result, metazoan hosts have in turn evolved mechanisms for enhanced pathogen recognition, the most complex and sophisticated of which is the system of adaptive immunity. Yet adaptive immunity to new pathogens is slow, and successful host defense requires a rapid response that can at least hold pathogen growth in check until adaptive immunity develops. As a result, a number of pathogen recognition mechanisms have arisen that broaden the spectrum of pathogen containment. These recognition mechanisms involve soluble extracellular proteins that bind to the surfaces of possible pathogens and are in turn recognized by receptors on phagocytic cells. This indirect recognition of the pathogen in response to deposition of soluble host proteins is called opsonization.

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