Adaptation and Immunity 英文参考文献.docVIP

Open access, freely available online Primer Adaptation and Immunity Eddie C. Holmes T site (silent change; d ), as expected if he ongoing battle between hosts and pathogens has long been of interest to evolutionary biologists. Because hosts and pathogens act as environments for each other, their intertwined struggle for change; d ) often greatly exceed those of synonymous substitution per because the luxury of adaptive N immunity is not available to most organisms, having probably evolved along with the vertebrates (Bartl et al. 1994), whereas the more widespread innate immune system is often depicted as a primitive characteristic. S most mutations are ?xed because they increase ?tness (Figure 1). At the host level, most studies of the selection pressures acting on immune system genes have concentrated on genes implicated in the adaptive immune response against microbial pathogens, particularly those producing antibodies (Sitnikova and Nei 1998; Sumiyama et al. 2002), or genes encoding reconnaissance molecules known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which control the action of T-cells (Hughes and Nei 1988; Yeager and Hughes 1999) (Box 1). As its name suggests, the role of the adaptive immune response is to stimulate and ‘memorise’ immunity to speci?c pathogens. existence is both continual and rapid. At the molecular level, this cycle of environmental change and evolutionary response means that mutations are continually being tried out by natural selection. It is therefore little wonder that the host and pathogen genes that control infection and immunity frequently show high levels of genetic diversity and present some of the best examples of positive selection (adaptive evolution) reported to date (Yang and Bielawski 2000). In particular, rates of nonsynonymous substitution per site (resulting in an amino acid Molecular Evolution of the Innate Immune System The genes involved in innate immunity have recently come under the molecular evolutionists