New areas of neuroscience are looking from the bottom-up, focusing on how the gut impacts the brain. These findings and more have earned our gut microbiome the nickname “the second brain.”
Viruses are everywhere cellular life is present, often in unfathomable numbers. They mutate very often, frequently by recombining with other viruses. This means that new viruses are constantly being generated.
As we’ll learn in this article, viruses are very simple, but despite their simplicity, they are very effective and impressive little creatures. We’ll also learn how our immune system rises to the challenge.
The immune system is the collection of cells, tissues, and molecules that work together to recognize the healthy cells that make up the body, and protect us against the unfamiliar or damaged.
The immune system monitors our body continuously searching for certain categories of things that may threaten our health: infectious microbes, viruses, fungi, and parasites (i.e., germs or pathogens); toxic cellular products; and damaged or diseased cells, including senescent or tumor cells.
The gut and brain are constantly communicating and influencing each other. This interaction is called the gut-brain axis. It means that what goes on in the gut can affect how the brain performs, influencing how we think, feel and behave. In this article, we explore the gut-brain connection and how the brain and the gut, our second brain, influence each other.
The gut microbiota influences many aspects of human physiology, from metabolism, to the cardiovascular system or the nervous system, for example. In this article, we focus on the interaction between the gut microbiota and our immune system.
