What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells don't have to spend a few days finding them.
You want the right books at the front. A mission to move all the books to the front is perhaps misguided.
The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing.
Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about.
So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
Someone else has mentioned the Kurzgesagt resources, which are great. If you want something more formal, OME is also a great resource I think.
https://onlinemeded.org/spa/immunology
>I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
Right. Antibodies have a Y shape, where the two tips of the Y are variable, and the base is fixed. The IgM are the completely random snippets that happen to match a wide variety of things. However, because it's chemistry, it's more subtle than match or no match. Think of it like a variable degree of stickiness.
When a pathogen is found, your body is going to iteratively mutate new antibodies and select those that bind the best to the collected antigens, until you have something very specific (= sticks very readily). I'm simplifying a little bit, but that's the process for generating IgGs that I was talking about.
The shuffling is done by recombination, which means joining segments of DNA in a random fashion (a similar recombination process is actually used for DNA repair, though with somewhat less randomness!)
There's a lot more to say about all of this, but I don't know how much immunology I can usefully describe in a few HN comments =]
Does that imply that there's a good chance someone's immune system will just fail to generate any appropriate antibodies against a novel intruder? Or does the "fuzzy matching" aspect mean that exploring a small percentage of the space mean you're very likely to get at least some degree of success?
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/gp/aw/d/0593241312/ref=tmm_hrd_s...
Pretty cool illustrations too.
Listening now, thanks!
Is that actually how it works in any sense?