Name: Tiny Bombs in your Blood - The Complement System
Uploaded: 2020-02-18T04:51:56.000Z
Duration: 8 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Every living being needs to fight off other living beings that want to feast on them.​

So as multicellular life evolved over billions of years, it came up with ways to defend itself.​

Today humans have a sophisticated defense network,​

like physical barriers, defense cells, and weapons factories.​

But one of the most important defenses of our body is largely unknown:​

It evolved over 700 million years ago and is an army of over 30 different proteins​

that work together in a complex and elegant dance to stop intruders.​

All in all, about 15 quintillion of them are saturating every fluid in your body right now.​

these proteins are one of the most effective weapons we have against invaders.​

Many other parts of the immune system are just tools to activate the Complement System.​

Imagine having trillions of little bombs inside your blood that could go off at any moment.​

So our cells use numerous mechanisms to prevent​ ​complement from accidentally attacking ​​them​.​

Okay, what exactly does it do and what makes it so dangerous?​

In a nutshell, The Complement System does three things:​

it cripples enemies, it activates the immune system, and it rips holes in things until they die.​

After all, these are mindless proteins randomly drifting around without will or direction.​

Well, this is actually part of the strategy.​

Complement proteins float around in a sort-of passive mode.​

They do nothing, until they get activated and change their shape.​

In the world of proteins, your shape determines what you can and cannot do.​

Because shape determines what you can interact with and in what way.​

For example, in your passive shape you might do nothing.​

In your active shape, however, you might, for example, change the shape of other proteins​

activating them so they can activate others.​

Mechanisms like this one can start cascades that spread very quickly.​

Imagine the complement proteins as being like millions of matches very close together.​

Once one catches fire, it ignites the ones around it.​

They ignite more and suddenly you have a big fire.​

To show the actual mechanisms of The Complement System is a tad complicated and overwhelming.​

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Tiny Bombs in your Blood - The Complement System

sort

immune

overwhelming

grab