Chapter 42 Lecture Enrichment Ideas
Inflammation is often overlooked as an important process; emphasize its role as one of the nonspecific reactions that helps protect the body from invasion.
Describe the specificity of the immune response, with special emphasis on the lock-and-key mechanism of antigen-antibody interaction.
Continue exploring in more detail how the process becomes more specific as it goes on, so that later antibodies bind more tightly to the antigen than earlier ones. This is a part of the clonal selection that occurs, and the memory cells are able to react more selectively against the antigen if it should appear again. Discuss why you don't get measles or chicken pox more than once and how influenza viruses must continually change their surface proteins.
Include the use of recombinant DNA technology in the possible production of vaccines for AIDS or the possible treatment of cancer with these new methods.
Ask why it takes so long (sometimes years) to produce allergy relief through allergy shots and whether the shots must be continued when relief has occurred.
Emphasize the distinction between T and B cells. Discuss the maturation process of T cells in the thymus and the presence of a separate organ (the bursa of Fabricius) in birds that has a similar function in maturation of the B cells there. Athymic (nude) mice lack a thymus (and hair) and can be grafted with practically any tissue (including chicken skin—they grow feathers!) without rejection because the pre-T cells have no organ in which to mature.
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