The evolution of adaptive immune systems.

By M. Cooper, M. Alder. Cell, 2006

826 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A clonally diverse anticipatory repertoire in which each lymphocyte bears a unique antigen receptor is the central feature of the adaptive immune system that evolved in our vertebrate ancestors. The survival advantage gained through adding this type of adaptive immune system to a pre-existing innate immune system led to the evolution of alternative ways for lymphocytes to generate diverse antigen receptors for use in recognizing and repelling pathogen invaders. All jawed vertebrates assemble their antigen-receptor genes through recombinatorial rearrangement of different immunoglobulin or T cell receptor gene segments. The surviving jawless vertebrates, lampreys and hagfish, instead solved the receptor diversification problem by the recombinatorial assembly of leucine-rich-repeat genetic modules to encode variable lymphocyte receptors. The convergent evolution of these remarkably different adaptive immune systems involved innovative genetic modification of innate-immune-system components.

Subfields: Immunology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/309a20c406951d640bbd99c1da424dc3b971758a

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Citations in the corpus

• Human natural killer cells. (2008, background): “The near complete absence of morbidity and mortality from GVHD is likely multifactorial and explained by (1) the low burden of donor T cells infused with the graft; (2) the absence or low-level expression of activating NK receptor ligands (eg, MICA/B and ULBPs) on the cell surface of host skin, gut,”
• IgT, a primitive immunoglobulin class specialized in mucosal immunity (2010, background): “1913" language="eng" relation="no"> Adaptive immunity first emerged in vertebrates around 550 million years ago along with the appearance of the jawless fish, the most ancient living vertebrate specie”
• Insect immune priming: ecology and experimental evidences (2016, background): “These discoveries may support a mechanism for diversity generation in invertebrates (Cooper & Alder, 2006).”
• Origin and Functions of Tissue Macrophages (2014, background): “Introduction The Phagocyte: Ilya Metchnikoff and the Historical Perspective Macrophages were first discovered late in the 19th century by Ilya Metchnikoff and are evolutionary conserved phagocytes that evolved more than 500 million years ago (Cooper and Alder, 2006; Tauber, 2003).”
• Pattern recognition receptors and control of adaptive immunity (2009, background): “Antigen receptors of the adaptive immune system offer a number of unique advantages because of their ability to recognize nearly any antigen and their clonal expression (3).”
• DNA transposons and the evolution of eukaryotic genomes. (2007, background): “The acquisition of V(D)J recombination is often regarded as a key step in the evolution of the adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates (32, 88).”