Q&A: What if Immune Cells Don’t Actually Detect Viruses and Bacteria?

This idea is pretty different from a lot of assumptions that are made about how immune cells detect pathogens. And it’s for this reason that we call these molecules that our innate immune system senses pathogen-associated molecular patterns. And there’s been an ongoing discussion through the years about how our immune system can recognize infections productively. So I’m curious what that could mean for long-term immune system interactions, and the idea of the immune system and pathogens being locked in an arms race. But the sisters of those are these guard proteins that seem to have the ability to detect pathogens very, very specifically.