Our immune system is talented at telling the difference between the chemistry of our own body and that of an invading pathogen. When it malfunctions, our body can become host to an intense civil war.
Scientists are keen to understand this in more detail, and a newly identified ‘switch’ that deactivates a sensor of foreign DNA may provide important insight.
A key part of this discovery, made by a team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, is an enzyme called cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS).
Leave a reply