Although all multicellular organisms have germ line–encoded innate receptors to sense
pathogen-associated molecular patterns, vertebrates also evolved adaptive immunity based …

Efforts to understand autoimmunity have been pursued relentlessly for several decades. It
has become apparent that the immune system evolved multiple mechanisms for controlling …

Multivalent molecules with repetitive structures including bacterial capsular polysaccharides
and viral capsids elicit antibody responses through B cell receptor (BCR) crosslinking in the …

Autoimmunity arises when immune tolerance to specific self-antigens is broken. The
mechanisms leading to such a failure remain poorly understood. One hypothesis proposes …

BACKGROUND Host immune responses are classically divided into innate immune
responses, which react rapidly and nonspecifically upon encountering a pathogen, and …

Autoreactive B cells are present in the lymphoid tissues of healthy individuals, but typically
remain quiescent. When this homeostasis is perturbed, the formation of self-reactive …

The immune system responds in a regulated fashion to microbes and eliminates them, but it
does not respond to self-antigens. Several regulatory mechanisms function to terminate …

The innate and adaptive immune systems act in concert to effectively combat infection while
minimizing collater al damage caused by the host immune response. T cells of the adaptive …

Recognition and clearance of a bacterial infection are a fundamental properties of innate
immunity. Here, we describe an effector B cell population that protects against microbial …

Great strides have been made in our understanding of the pathogenesis of autoimmune
diseases. Research has identified genetic associations, new functional subsets of effector …