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Adaptive Immunity from Prokaryotes to Eukaryotes: Broader Inclusions Due to Less Exclusivity?

E. Cooper

Published 2012 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

The currently held view of the immune system proposes generally acceptable descriptions supported by strong evidence. There are two primary systems: innate and adaptive but distributed “unequally” among the two major animal groups (ignoring mostly all plants). Animal groups include the multitudinous invertebrates and vertebrates with vertebrates being the greatest beneficiaries of a fully functional complex immune apparatus that combines the two systems. Despite this super armamentarium, the overwhelming problems of possessing this dual system, as the vertebrates i.e. the innate and adaptive does not seem to guard or even prevent the development of one internal threat to survival. This is the scourge: development of cancer. By contrast invertebrates whose immune system is primarily of the innate type manage to eat, reproduce and survive without developing cancer. Briefly the immune system consists of: Innate: natural, nonspecific, no memory, nonanticipatory, non-clonal, germ line; Adaptive: acquired, specific, memory, anticipatory, clonal, somatic. In general, both systems and in the simplest reductionist terms, each must possess a cell that recognizes an antigen and digests it. The second cell if appropriately stimulated must react to destroy a potentially detrimental antigen. During evolution more cells were added to this armamentarium giving rise to increasing functions associated with effector activity. Emerging information supports the view that overlap or blurring exists between these two sometimes rigidly defined systems. Clearly evidence suggests that lines of demarcation within and between innate and adaptive may not be so strictly delineated— there is immunologic flexibility designated as blurring, not “black and white”.

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