Till death and beyond
Your body’s first line of defence against bacteria and fungi is a kind of white blood cell called neutrophil granulocytes. For more than a century, scientists have known that the body’s bone marrow produces these immune cells at a rate of millions a minute. They hunt invading bacteria at the site of infection, killing their prey by ingesting it and breaking it down with antimicrobial proteins. But new research from the Max Planck Institute for Infectious Biology has described another method by which neutrophils protect the body. Neutrophils, when stimulated correctly, will begin a process of suicide that collects enzymes and other bacteria-killing components inside themselves. The neutrophil contracts until its membrane bursts and releases these components into structures nicknamed the Neutrophil Extracellular Traps, or NETs. Though the neutrophil is dead, their NETs kill just as many bacteria as their living counterparts.
Source: Journal of Cell Biology
-S.H.
