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Let’s make ourselves a little smarter today.
From the article:
Scientists find deep-sea bacteria that are invisible to the human immune system.
Bacteria collected from more than a mile below the surface of the Pacific Ocean may have just blown one of immunology's longest-held assumptions clean out of the water.
The bacteria are so alien to humans that our immune cells do not even register that they exist, making them completely invisible to our immune systems.
This totally contradicts one of the classic tenets of immunology — that the human immune system evolved to be able to sense every single microbe so it could catch the infectious ones.
"The idea was that the immune system is a generalist, it doesn't care if something was a threat or not, it just got rid of it. But no one had really pressure tested that assumption until now," Jonathan Kagan, an immunologist at Boston Children's Hospital and one of the study leaders, told Live Science.
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