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Immunological memory 1

Part 1 of 2
Published on October 29, 2020   38 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - Key Concepts and Questions

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0:00
My name is David Gray and work at the University of Edinburgh in the School of Biological Sciences. I'm going to talk to you today about immunological memory.
0:12
The talk will have really three sections. First of all, I'll have some general thoughts about immunological memory. Then we'll talk about how memory is generated. In the final section, how memory is maintained over very long periods of time.
0:30
In main memory, what do we mean when we say immunological or immune memory? A simple definition would be as follows, an enhanced and accelerated response upon exposure to an antigen that the immune system has encountered before. What that leads to our quantitative changes, changes in the quantity of molecules and cells in the immune system and it leads to changes which are qualitative, the quality of the response does change.
0:60
I wanted to give you an example of that. It's a simple one, thinking about the production of antibody during an immune response, that the levels go up following a primary immunization. You can see here in the top of the slide, the IgM response goes up along with slightly slower the IgG response. But the second time antigen comes into the system and the secondary response, you see an increase, of a quite large increase in the IgG response. The increasingly the IgM which is less apparent. That's an increased one sees over time during a memory response, which is an increase in the amount of antibody that are produced. Before looks in the lower part, you can also see there is a difference in the quality of that antibody. That the affinity of that antibody for the antigen increases after the secondary response and after the tertiary response. There is also obviously a change in the type of antibody that's made. IgG is made more prevalently in the secondary than in the primary. There are qualitative changes and quantitative changes occurring as a result of the generation of memory.

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