This cartoon is showing the battle between a leukocyte and a bacterium. Who will win?
The interactions between the host cell and a pathogen trying to invade an organism, commonly referred to as host-pathogen interactions, are very important to understand disease. Each pathogen might have a unique way of interacting with their host and the host may react in different ways to different pathogens. This is a battle that goes on inside our bodies when we get sick, we may not see it but we feel it.
Here is more information on host-pathogen interactions.
- Pathogens have evolved various means of evading or subverting normal host defenses. Immunobiology: The Immune System in Health and Disease. 5th edition.
- Cell Biology of Infection Molecular Biology of the Cell. 4th edition
- Evolutionary insights into host–pathogen interactions from mammalian sequence data Nature Reviews Genetics 16, 224–236 (2015)