Mason D
MRC Cellular Immunology Unit Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, Oxford, U.K.
Sci Prog. 1992;76(299 Pt 1):125-38.
The immune system has evolved to protect an organism from the pathogens that invade it but the effector mechanisms involved in mediating this protection are potentially lethal to the host itself. Consequently it is essential that they are not elicited by the host's own tissues and, because biochemically self and non-self are very similar, the immune system has had to develop an exquisite capability to distinguish relatively minor differences. There has been considerable progress recently in understanding how this discrimination is achieved although many questions remain. The problem is important in that the mechanisms that ensure self tolerance occasionally fail. The consequences of this failure are the autoimmune diseases, many of which afflict Man. This article reviews what is known about the way that the immune system normally avoids self reactivity and how breakdown in self tolerance can occur.
免疫系统不断进化，以保护生物体免受入侵病原体的侵害，但介导这种保护作用的效应机制对宿主自身可能是致命的。因此，至关重要的是这些机制不会由宿主自身组织引发，而且由于生物化学上自身和非自身非常相似，免疫系统必须具备卓越的能力来区分相对微小的差异。尽管仍有许多问题，但最近在理解这种区分是如何实现方面已经取得了相当大的进展。这个问题很重要，因为确保自身耐受的机制偶尔会失效。这种失效的后果就是自身免疫性疾病，其中许多都折磨着人类。本文综述了关于免疫系统通常如何避免自身反应性以及自身耐受如何会出现破坏的已知情况。
