Work

Innate and procured immunity inside the digestive tract of the medicinal leech.

Year: 2011

Type: review

Abstract: Especially when combined with unique biological adaptations, invertebrate animals provide important insights into innate immunity because the immune response is not complicated by adaptive immunity that vertebrates evolved. One such example is the digestive tract of the medicinal leech, Hirudo verbana, which is unusual in two aspects, it contains a simple microbial community and it stores large amounts of vertebrate blood for a several months. In this review we will discuss aspects of the innate immunity of the leech and from the ingested blood that we term procured immunity to differentiate it from the immunity encoded by the leech genome.

Source: Invertebrate survival journal

Authors: Ac Silver, J Graf

Institution: Yale University

Language: English

Topic: Invertebrate Immune Response Mechanisms

Subfield: Immunology

Field: Immunology and Microbiology

Domain: Life Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: diamond

Funders: National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Awards: Functional Analysis of a Digestive-Tract Microbiome During Dietary Changes, CAREER: Establishment of Hirudo medicinalis as a model for digestive-tract symbioses