Is there a good resource to learn more about this without a Biology degree? I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
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!