This article outlines the findings of a study by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine. One of the lead researchers says that they have found bacteria that have a ‘clear role in regulating immune function in the lungs’. This is an interesting conclusion as the lungs were originally thought to be a sterile part of the body. This experiment is proclaimed to ‘provide the basis to study other aspects of lung immune function that may be affected by microbial communities, and may also help with improving nasal vaccines used to protect against infections of the lung elsewhere in the body’. I chose this article as I did a small project on clostridium difficile which is a bacteria which is in many people but it is competing for the same space as friendly bacteria in the gut. I thought they were quite related in that sense. In the guts case, friendly bacteria helps to digest food that enters the gut. An example would be the fact that humans cannot eat ruminants as we don’t have the bacteria that digests ruminants. The proof for the research’s conclusion comes from dendritic cells which are described as tree shaped cells that create and limit our immunity. They found that in germ free monkeys Immunoglobulin A was not produced (at dendritic cells). When they exposed monkeys to bacteria the immunoglobulin A was produced. Immunoglobulin A is a key antibody which is produced at dendritic cells in the lung. I thought this was really interesting as the hygiene hypothesis when we get exposed to less and less bacteria may be a relevant factor to the production of immunoglobulin
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