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anonymous

Things We Don't Know: The beast with a billion backs: Part 1 - 0 views

blog.thingswedontknow.com/...with-billion-backs-part-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • We like to think of ourselves in the singular, but the reality is we are a swirling composite of thousands of species, more accurately thought of as an ecosystem than as an individual.
  • There is the core ‘us’, the cells that contain our DNA. But we are also like the land on which a rich forest might grow
  • Together they are our ‘microbiome’.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • in return for shelter and a share of the spoils from our meals, some make vitamins, liberate nutrients and energy from food, and protect us from their pathogenic cousins. Millions of years of co-evolution with our microbial horde have forged this relationship, shaping us both in ways whose significance we’re still trying to understand.
  • One of the biggest problems in unpicking the microbiome’s relationship with health is working out if the changes and differences are a cause, an intermediate step, or a consequence of developing a disease.
  • separating our environment from disease is proving hard.
  • Crohns disease is a good example
  • we know a disrupted microbiota is one of its features.
  • But we can’t yet say for sure if this is the cause or the effect.
  • If it starts with our own physiology, then we need to investigate treatments targeted at those changes, but if it starts with the microbiome our treatments will be different.
  • With so many branches it’s perhaps no surprise that so many other organisms can call us ‘home’.
  • In the past we’ve been well served by the one-pathogen-one-disease model for tracking, monitoring and avoiding infectious diseases. But do beneficial, or harmless, bugs in the microbiome spread like pathogens? If not, how?
  • It is important to understand this because of the number of links between the microbiome and a number of diseases like diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, food allergies, and even obesity.
  • An improved picture of how our communities of microbes – good and bad – come together and move through populations could help us to develop interventions to significantly reduce, or prevent, the numbers of people with these conditions. Or, at the least, find ways to hobble this trend.
  • Understanding both the flow of microbes and the factors which influence it may also be important for any treatments we produce.
  • We’ve been manipulating our microbial ecosystems for years, both naturally through our immune systems and, perhaps more worryingly, through a weapon of microbial mass destruction: antibiotics.
  • anonymous on 15 Apr 13
     
    "This post is by freelance science writer Gavin Hubbard. Gavin originally trained as a Medical Biochemist at the University of Surrey and spent over 10 years working in biotechnology, immunology and clincal trials. He writes both for industry and for a general audience, with a focus on health, immunology and pathology. He blogs at Sciencehubb.co.uk and can be found on twitter as @GavinHub"
anonymous

Origin and differentiation of immune system cells - 0 views

rationaldiscoveryblog.com/...tiation-of-immune-system-cells

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 13 - Cached
  • Origin and differentiation of immune system cells
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 13
     
    "The human immunological system comprises several organs including the spleen, thymus, lymph nodes and bone marrow, each contributing to the development of immune cells. Shown above is a nice overview of these immune cells in terms of the stem cell origin and subsequent differentiation."
anonymous

Scientists create biggest family tree of human cells - 0 views

phys.org/...biggest-family-tree-human.html

immunesystem immunology cells biology human

shared by anonymous on 21 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Cells are the basic unit of a living organism. The human body consists of a vast array of highly specialized cells, such as blood cells, skin cells and neurons. In total more than 250 different cell types exist.
  • How are the different types related to each other? Which factors are unique for each cell type? And what in the end determines the development of a certain cell?
  • These factors, or master regulators, determine the development and distinguish different cell types from each other. With this information they could map the relationship between the cell types in a family tree.
  • anonymous on 21 Apr 13
     
    "In a paper published today by the prestigious journal, Nature Methods, biologists at the University of Luxembourg, Tampere University of Technology and the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, USA, have created the biggest family tree of human cell types."
anonymous

Get Inside a Cell! - 1 views

artsedge.kennedy-center.org/...What_Is-Inside_a_Cell.aspx

immunology cells visualizations

shared by anonymous on 10 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Jun 11
     
    "Investigate how form and function are related in cells through scientific illustration. How can illustration show us the relationship between form and function in a cell?"
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