Immune Responses and Viral Modulation of Immune Responses

The immune response is how your body recognises and protects itself against intruders, which can include a wide range of microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungus that, if left unchecked, can seriously harm the health of the host organism.

There are two separate components Innate and adaptive immune responses, which combine to defend against pathogens.

1. The body's earliest defence against an invader is known as the innate branch, and it is recognised to have a nonspecific and fast response to any pathogen. Physical defences like skin and mucous membranes, immune cells like neutrophils, macrophages, and monocytes, and soluble substances like cytokines and complement are all parts of the innate immune response.
2. The adaptive branch is the body’s immune response, which targets specific antigens, takes longer to activate the necessary components. The adaptive branch includes cells like dendritic cells, T cells, and B cells as well as antibodies, sometimes known as immunoglobulin’s, which directly interact with antigen and are a crucial part of a strong response against an invader.

Pattern recognition receptors are used to identify and find pathogens (PRR). These receptors are surface-mounted macrophage components that can bind external invaders and start cellular signalling within the immune cell.
Betaherpesviruses like HCMV have a significant impact on host cell physiology and encode a wide range of functions that regulate both the immune response and the infected host cell (Mocarski, 2002, 2004). Major structural and non-structural proteins influence adaptive antibody or T-lymphocyte immunity as well as host cell transcriptional repression (Saffert and Kalejta, 2006; Tavalai et al., 2006); responses to interferon (Child et al., 2004; Khan et al., 2004); cell-intrinsic responses (Abate et al., 2004; Goldmacher, 2004); and natural killer (NK) lymphocytes.

The balance between host clearance and viral escape mechanisms may control many aspects of viral pathogenesis since the host immune components that are targets of HCMV modulation are also key host functions in preventing virus infection. HCMV appears to be able to avoid the full force of host innate and adaptive immunity, which allows the virus to survive, by lessening the total impact of antiviral defences.