TOLL-erating cardiac hypertrophy following pressure overload.

Sensing and defeating microbial infections are essential to the survival of metazoan species and contingent upon the reliable detection of pathogens, which are characterized by rapid evolution and molecular heterogeneity. Multicellular species have developed two overall strategies to kill and remove parasites, to send them ‘‘floating on the Stygian river’’ (after the river Styx in Hades, the underworld, in Greek mythology), as alluded to in the poem ‘‘Lenore’’ from Edgar Allen Poe: an innate versus an adaptive immune recognition system. The first line of defense (the innate system) is limited to the recognition of evolutionarily conserved pathogen motifs, molecular patterns that are unique to the microbial world and invariable among classes of pathogens. In contrast, the adaptive system involves dynamic adaptation (e.g. antibody generation) to unique epitopes on pathogens in the environment. Induction of the innate immune system is fast (usual within hours) and depends upon targets of pattern recognition, pathogenassociated molecular patterns or PAMPs that are recognized by pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) [1]. The Toll-like receptor (TLR) family is the best-characterized class of PRRs in mammalian species, and TLRs are ubiquitously expressed throughout species in plants, nemat-