Antigens – Antibodies

Makeup of an Antibody

  The immune system is immensely complex and complicated. I will not even attempt to give you a scale of the thing, but there are plenty of places you can look for more detail (video complement system, video, blog organ transplant, wikipedia). Instead I shall just take a very small part of it, the antibodies, … Read more

Chemotaxis

We judge food by smell

  When I see a cake, I head straight towards it and help myself to a slice. And when I see a large cloud of fume rising up from a smoker, I make a little detour, so my baby doesn’t have to inhale the toxic fumes. All this gets a little bit more complicated, when … Read more

A video of life

Something that scientists would love to do is to look at a live working cell (ideally human, but we’d be happy with anything) in all its glorious detail, see all its proteins at work and moving, while being able to monitor the concentration of every substrate and metabolite. Apart from the fact that you can’t … Read more

Caenorhabditis elegans on its hunt

My extremely versatile little friend Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the most studied organisms in the world. Whether researchers are looking to find a cure for cancer, discover the mechanisms underlying ageing or study innate immunity, this little fellow can help them. Even on this website you will find more than a hundred articles mentioning … Read more

The world in your gut

It’s me, the walking bacterioverse You have probably heard that by number most of the cells in your body are not actually human, but bacteria (but don’t worry, by mass we are mostly human). Although bacteria are literally crawling all over us, we do not actually notice most of them. Some of them we brush … Read more