Saskia is fascinated that C1q->C1qr2s2->C4bC2->C4b2b->C4b2b3b->C4b2b3b5b67->C5b6789n leads to lysis of a bacterial cell.

So simple it's almost retarded.

As scared as I was at the beginning of the semester, I am very much in love with immunology. This semester is really telling me that my future could very well lie with infectious diseases, public health, etc. Stay tuned.


As to the above heading, that is the classical complement system that works in conjunction with your antibodies to head off invasion of pathogens. It's really quite neat, in a totally "micromanager" kind of way. Here is a fun little video that shows the process with neat little 3D models:





You can really give yourself a major headache if you stop to think about how minute of an action it really is for these silly little plasma proteins to swim around in our blood and chance running into each other to build these slightly larger complexes that can then find their way (again by chance) to some nefarious microbe that they will bind themselves to and proceed to burrow a fun little hole into it's side. But not just one hole, oh no. These nasty microbes can deal with one eensy weensy little hole. No, these complement proteins have a system for making many many holes all in a relatively short period of time. Once their main protein complex is built, they can just continue to make the same "tail" portion over and over, which breaks off and re-attaches to the microbe's cell wall to build the little hole. The official term for the hole-building portion is the Membrane Attack Complex. Don't know why I love that. The Membrane Attack Complex (MAC) inserts Over and Over and Over until the cell essentially fills with extracellular fluid and lyses (breaks open and dies)!

The other mind-blowing portion to all of this is the simple (or not so) ability of the complement system to recognize pathogenic cells. Could you imagine if your body couldn't recognize what cells were it's own versus invaders?! (I smell an autoimmune disease in our midst!) Your body would essentially attack it's own cells and you would die. Crazyass stuff.

Alright, that's all I've got for you tonight. I'm busy fighting off an infectious agent of my own...a nice doozy of a head cold. Nothing that a little NyQuil can't fix. Sometimes you just can't wait for your body to get into gear.