Lung defences: an overview

Pulmonary immune cells in health and disease: lymphocytes.

Immunological defence mechanisms of the lung are provided by several different types of immunocompetent cell. Among these, the most important are lymphocytes, alveolar macrophages and neutrophils. This review focuses mainly on the pattern of physiological activities of pulmonary lymphocytes in the local host defences. The article provides an overview of the events leading to the recruitment, ho...

Cellular Defences of the Lung: Comparative Perspectives

1 Lung immune defences in the immunosuppressed patient

The respiratory tract is constantly exposed to environmental elements and potential pathogens on a daily basis during the obligatory process of breathing or through subclinical aspiration. To avoid infectious disease pathogenesis in the respiratory tract, a number of elegant, complex and interdependent systems of host defence mechanisms are in place to prevent microorganism colonization of the ...

Herbivore-induced, indirect plant defences.

Indirect responses are defensive strategies by which plants attract natural enemies of their herbivores that act as plant defending agents. Such defences can be either constitutively expressed or induced by the combined action of mechanical damage and low- or high-molecular-weight elicitors from the attacking herbivore. Here, we focus on two induced indirect defences, namely the de novo product...

An examination of the Generic Exploit Prevention Mechanisms on Apple's Leopard Operating System

The Win32 platform has long been the whipping boy of memory corruption attacks and malware, which has forced Microsoft into implementing aggressive anti-exploitation mechanisms into their newer Operating Systems. Apple's Mac OS X (Leopard) has had a much smoother run, both in the media, and in terms of high profile attacks and the reason for this is less clear. In light of Apple's increased mar...