Screening the fruitfly immune system 英文参考文献.docVIP

/2002/3/4/reviews/1010.1 Minireview Screening the fruitfly immune system Marc S Dionne and David S Schneider Address: Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5124, USA. Correspondence: David Schneider. E-mail: dschneider@ Published: 27 March 2002 GenomeBiology 2002, 3(4):reviews1010.1–1010.2 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2002/3/4/reviews/1010 ? BioMed Central Ltd (Print ISSN 1465-6906; Online ISSN 1465-6914) Abstract The anti-microbial defense system ofDrosophila shows functional similarities with the vertebrate innate immune system. Two recent gene-expression profiling studies of fruitflies challenged with infectious agents have identified key molecular players in the fruitfly’s response to bacterial and fungal infection, as well as a large number of immune-regulated genes with unknown immunological function. In recent years, Drosophila has emerged as a popular model system for the study of immunity to infection. The reasons for this are two-fold. , irst, the fly immune system is mecha- nistically similar to the mammalian innate immune system and thus the fly is a model for vertebrate innate immunity without having the distraction of the more complex adaptive immune system of vertebrates, which employs huge reper- toires of antigen-specific lymphocytes. Second, the fly is a model for arthropods (such as mosquitoes, fleas and ticks) that carry human diseases; any knowledge of Drosophila immunity is likely to be pertinent in the study of how these animals spread diseases to people. regards. There is a potential disadvantage to the whole- animal approach, however: it is possible that immune responses that take place only in specific tissues are unde- tectable in a whole-animal experiment because they are drowned out by baseline expression in non-responsive