Dr. Giulia Enders

And then your immune system says, oh, we had some peanut.

But you can be here if you don't do anything damaging.

But then microbes sometimes do the opposite.

They do damage ourselves.

And then the immune system will get a bit nosy.

It'll be like, what's going on here?

Call some colleagues of mine.

We'll check it out.

And then we'll all share our opinion and then decide whether we start an inflammatory reaction, for example.

So should we think about our skin and our gut microbiome as part of our immune system?

Absolutely.

And I think it's scientifically correct now and regarded as such.

And so how does our immune system tell whether this is a good microbe and I want it as like an extended part of my immune system or this is like a bad microbe and I need to try and get rid of it?

There is different immune cells and there's different ways of how they look at us.

And some will go with very basic ground rules.

Like they'll say if there's a leakage of intracellular liquids, like, you know, the plasma of the cell basically running out because a cell is damaged.

A cell wall was damaged by a microbe, for example.

And this is a typical pattern where some sort of immune cell will go there and be like, whoa.

Why is there, you know, a cell leakage?

What happened here?