WILTIMS #168: Did you mean energy?

TIL: Anergy is a word. I swear I stared at that slide for five minutes trying to figure out if it was a super prominent typo or a word I had never seen. Turns out its the latter. Anergy is essentially the opposite of an allergy. Where an allergy is an overreaction by the immune system, anergy is the lack of an immune response. Anergy can be helpful in telling the body not to attack itself, but can also lead to an immunodeficient state if it is trained not to attack actual pathogens.

Secondly, Listeria is one frightenly persistent bug. Generally, when the body finds a bacterium swimming around in its fluids, it sends macrophages to go phagocytize (eat) and digest it. It then uses the fragments to train the adaptive immune system to hunt down and find any more of those bacteria that might be around. But Listeria has found an escape route. If a bacterium can escape the vesicles that the macrophages use to trap and digest them, they can live in the cytoplasm. Listeria can secrete an enzyme called hemolysin and dissolve the walls of its prison cell.

The body will (usually) still be able to overcome this tactic by recruiting other macrophages and immune cells to kill the infected macrophage, releasing the bacteria back into the body fluid to be again attacked and engulfed, hopefully with better results.

Lastly, the drug atropine is derived from the belladonna plant. Belladonna literally means "fair lady" and was named so because it (among other things) would dilate the eyes, which was a desirable trait in 18th century Italy.