The mammalian complement system plays an important role in the immune defense in blood and interstitial fluids. This set of ~30, mostly multi-domain, plasma proteins and cell-surface receptors enables the host to recognize and clear invading pathogens and altered host cells, while protecting healthy host cells and tissues. In addition to humoral immune defense, complement proteins are produced ...

The complement system in blood plasma is a major mediator of innate immune defence. The function of complement is to recognize, then opsonize or lyse, particulate materials, including bacteria, yeasts and other microrganisms, host cell debris and altered host cells. Recognition occurs by binding of complement proteins to charge or saccharide arrays. After recognition, a series of serine proteas...

Recent advances have demonstrated that bacterial cells have an exquisitely organized and dynamic subcellular architecture. Like their eukaryotic counterparts, bacteria employ a full complement of cytoskeletal proteins, localize proteins and DNA to specific subcellular addresses at specific times, and use intercellular signaling to coordinate multicellular events. The striking conceptual and mol...

The complement system consists of 3 pathways and more than 30 proteins, including those with biological activity that directly or indirectly mediate the effects of this system, plus a set of regulatory proteins necessary to prevent injudicious complement activation on host tissue. The role for complement in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is paradoxic. On one hand, the co...

Inflammation and thrombosis are two responses that are linked through a number of mechanisms, one of them being the complement system. Various proteins of the complement system interact specifically with platelets, which, in turn, activates them and promotes thrombosis. In this paper, we show that the converse is also true: activated platelets can activate the complement system. As assessed by ...

Understanding the structural organisation and mode of action of the initiating complex of the classical pathway of complement activation (C1) has been a central goal in complement biology since its isolation almost 50 years ago. Nevertheless, knowledge is still incomplete, especially with regard to the interactions between its subcomponents C1q, C1r and C1s that trigger activation upon binding ...