Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Rm. S126B, Toronto, ON M4N 3M5, Canada.
Semin Immunol. 2010 Feb;22(1):39-47. doi: 10.1016/j.smim.2009.11.007. Epub 2009 Dec 22.
Detailed understanding of animal immunity derives almost entirely from investigations of vertebrates, with a smaller, but significant, contribution from studies in fruit flies. This limited phylogenetic scope has artificially polarized the larger view of animal immunity toward the complex adaptive immune systems of vertebrates on the one hand and systems driven by relatively small, stable families of innate receptors of insects on the other. In the past few years analyses of a series of invertebrate deuterostome genome sequences, including those from echinoderms and cephalochordates, sharply modify this view. These findings have far-reaching implications for characterizing the potential range of animal immunity and for inferring the evolutionary pathway that led to vertebrate immune systems.
对动物免疫的详细了解几乎完全来自对脊椎动物的研究，而来自果蝇研究的贡献则较小，但也很重要。这种有限的系统发育范围人为地将动物免疫的更广泛观点分为一方面是脊椎动物复杂的适应性免疫系统，另一方面是由相对较小、稳定的昆虫先天受体家族驱动的系统。在过去的几年中，对一系列后口动物基因组序列的分析，包括棘皮动物和头索动物的基因组序列，极大地改变了这一观点。这些发现对描述动物免疫的潜在范围以及推断导致脊椎动物免疫系统的进化途径具有深远的意义。
