things from your body-- or, if they get in, to kill them.

So those shady things would include shady proteins that

can do damage to your body, viruses, bacteria, even

eukaryotic parasites, and then even fungi.

So all sorts of things that if they were to enter your body,

they would cause some form of disease.

These are collectively called pathogens.

So the whole point of the immune system is, on a first

line of defense, keep these things out-- and then if they

were to get into your body, to kill and eliminate them from

our system so that we don't get sick and so

that we don't die.

So I already just mentioned that there's kind of two lines

of defense and even with those, there's kind of

subclassifications.

The first line of defense-- I'll just call that the first

line-- which is essentially just to keep things out-- keep

all of these pathogens out.

And there's some obvious ones.

There's our skin.

Our skin keeps pathogens out and actually even the oils on

our skin are a little bit more acidic and it's hard for some

types of bacteria to thrive in that type of environment.

You have your mucus membranes and in the mucus, there's

there's some chemicals that maybe make it a little bit

more difficult for bacteria to survive.

And then you even have acidic environments like

your stomach acid.

You might not view your stomach as the outside of you,

but it fundamentally is.

Your whole digestive tract, which I'll make videos on in

the near future, is really on the outside of you.

You can simply model really most vertebrate bodies as kind

of a doughnut our digestive tract is the

inside of the doughnut.

So stomach acid is on the outside of our real bodies and

you can imagine, that's a hard environment for a lot of these

pathogens to survive in.

So that's the first line of defense, but we know that

that's not good enough, that sometimes these things can get

into our bodies, and there we have to start thinking about

the second line of defense.

What do we do once things are actually in our body?

And here, in both the first and second line, I'm talking

about non-specific immunity-- and this is going to make a

lot of sense when we start talking about specific

immunities.

So both of these are non-specific.

And when I say non-specific-- or you can also call them

innate-- it means that they just generally respond to

things that appear bad.

They don't remember the bad things that came before.

They don't respond to a particular type of virus or a

particular-- well, they do respond to every type of virus

or every type of bacteria, but they don't say, this is virus

type A, B, C, or this is bacteria type A, B, C.

They just say, this is a virus.

Let me get rid of it, or let me not let it in.

This is a bacteria.

Let me get rid of it or let me not let it in.

It doesn't know what type of bacteria it's dealing with.

So this is all the non-specific or

innate immune system.

And we'll go into a lot of detail on the specific immune

system because you can imagine, it becomes very

complicated or interesting when you start thinking about

your body somehow remembering a virus that it's seen before

and being able to respond better to that virus or that

bacteria or that protein the second time it sees it.

So we're dealing with non-specific in this case.

And the the second line of your non-specific immunity,

there are two things.

One is an inflammatory response.

And I'm going to do a whole video on this, but in general,

we've all experienced inflammatory responses.

When you see blood flowing to a certain part of an area and

you see there's pus and there's-- and I'm going to go

into a lot more detail on what an inflammatory response

actually is, but that's one of your-- and what it really is

doing is bringing blood and bringing cells that can fight

whatever type of infection you have. It's bringing them to

the site where maybe you got a cut or maybe where a lot of

the bacteria or whatever the pathogen is.

So inflammatory response is all about bringing fluid and

fighters to the fight.

I'm going to do a whole video on that.

But the byproduct is, that part of your tissue or that

part of you body gets inflamed-- a lot of fluid

there, a lot of byproducts of the battle that goes on there.

We'll do a whole video on that.

And the other second line of defense is, and it's actually

part of the inflammatory response-- are phagocytosis or

phagocytes.

And really, what I want to do over the rest of this video is

talk in a little bit more detail about phagocytes

because once we understand what phagocytes do, that's a

pretty good building block for going into the specific immune

system-- and actually, it'll help lead into the discussion

on the inflammatory response as well because phagocytes are

really part of the inflammatory response.

So phagocytes are just a class of cell

that can eat up pathogens.

They can eat up other things really, but when we talk about

the immune system, we're talking about pathogens.

So let's say that this is a phagocyte right here.

This is a phagocyte right there.

It has some kind of a nucleus, whatever.

I don't have to focus on the inside of the phagocyte.

It's a traditional eukaryotic cell, but what I want to do is

see what happens when a phagocyte encounters a foreign

particle or a foreign bacteria.

So let me say this is a foreign bacteria right here.

So the phagocyte, we've already said, is non-specific.

What it does is, it has receptors that respond to just

things that it knows are bad.

You could imagine these are super sensors.

Maybe these are super sensors for bacteria.

The bacteria have proteins on their surface that maybe look

something like that.

Obviously they don't look exactly like that.

I'm just drawing them as kind of a Y and a triangle so you

can see that they fit.

But once these two guys connect-- let me draw the

situation where they have connected.

So this is the bacteria.

This is the pathogen.

And it's really the same idea with a virus or any

other type of thing.

And we'll actually see in future videos that these guys

can actually be tagged by other molecules, which makes

these phagocytes want to attack them even more.

Once they're bonded-- that's my bacteria,

the invading pathogen.

And now it is bonded.

It has triggered the receptor on this phagocyte.

This phagocyte will start to engulf-- it'll wrap around

this pathogen.

And these two ends are eventually going to meet.

But then once these two meet, what's it going to look like?

Then all of a sudden, that bacteria is going to be

completely engulfed.

It's going to be inside of the cell.

So now the cell-- once these two ends meet and these

membranes merge, then this guy is going to be in his own

little membrane bubble-- or you can almost imagine, it's

in its own little vesicle.

So this is the pathogen, the bacteria in this case-- but

phagocytosis-- the process is completely identical in terms

of how it engulfs things.

If it was a virus or some type of other foreign protein or

any type of really foreign molecule-- actually, sometimes

it doesn't even occur to foreign stuff.

It can occur to dying molecules that are not

foreign, that just need to be cleared out.

But we'll just focus on the immune system, on foreign

things right now.

So this membrane right here will completely merge and go

around this guy like this.

And of course, you had your receptors and who knows if

they're still there.

By the time-- let's just draw them there so you see that

that part is that part.

But once it's fully engulfed, this thing is called a

phagosome, on which is really just a vesicle that contains

that foreign particle that you want to get rid of.

And then other fluid or vesicles that contain things

that can eat up this phagosome-- so let's say that

this is some vesicle that contains things-- lysozymes

and it contains really reactive species of oxygen.

And if this comes in contact with, really, almost any

biological compound, it's going to do some damage.

But once the pathogen is completely merged inside the

cell, this little package will merge over here and it will

dump its contents into this phagosome, into this vesicle

containing the pathogen, and then break it up.

It's essentially digesting it.

So obviously the first role is, it just got it out of the

way and it killed it.

And then the second role-- and I'm just going to give a

little tidbit right here.

We're going to do it in a lot more detail in future videos.

It breaks it up.

So now the thing is all broken up.

So that thing is broken up into constituent proteins and

another molecules.

And then what the phagocyte does-- it'll actually take

some subset of these molecules, some

subset of the proteins.

It'll break them out.

Proteins are just sequences of amino acids.

Normally when people say proteins, they're talking

about long sequences of amino acids.

When people talk about short sequences of amino acids or a

protein that's broken up a lot, they refer to it as a

peptide chain.

A peptide chain is a shorter chain of amino acids.

So this guy will take some special peptide chains, some

special pieces from the thing it just killed, attach them to

some other proteins.

So it'll take maybe a little piece of this bacteria right

now, attach it to other protein, which is called a

major histocompatibility complex-- and if we're talking

about phagocytes, this will be a major histocompatibility

complex type II.

It sounds very-- a strange word, but we're going to see

this a lot.

So they abbreviate it MHC.

This is a protein and it bonds with this peptide that was

kind of chunked off or digested off of this invading

pathogen and then this phagocyte will then present it

onto its membrane.

So this combination-- the complex of the MHC-- in this

case, it's going to be an MHC II protein.

We're going to talk about Type II in the future.

It's going to take this complex and then present it on

its surface.

And the reason why I'm going through all this pain of

explaining this process-- you're like, hey, we already

got rid of the thing and killed it.

Why is Sal worried about what we do with the peptides?

This is crucial to our immune system because we'll see other

specific parts of our immune system.

Remember, so far everything is non-specific.

This guy just said, this is an invader.

It doesn't know the type of an invader.

It just says, hey, let me bond to this thing and kill it.

It's one of these things that I know are foreign to my body.

So it kills it, but now it can leave it on its surface and

now the specific parts, the parts that actually have

memory and attack specific things, can say, gee, Mr.

Phagocyte, look, you've killed something.

Let me see if I have some specific reactions that can be

triggered by this thing that you're presenting.