Phagocyte

Phagocytes are cells that protect the body by ingesting harmful foreign particles, bacteria, and dead or dying cells. Their name comes from the Greek phagein, 'to eat' or 'devour', and '-cyte', the suffix in biology denoting 'cell', from the Greek kutos, 'hollow vessel'. They are essential for fighting infections and for subsequent immunity. Phagocytes are important throughout the animal kingdom and are highly developed within vertebrates. One litre of human blood contains about six billion phagocytes. They were discovered in 1882 by Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov while he was studying starfish larvae. Mechnikov was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery. Phagocytes occur in many species; some amoebae behave like macrophage phagocytes, which suggests that phagocytes appeared early in the evolution of life. Phagocytes of humans and other animals are called 'professional' or 'non-professional' depending on how effective they are at phagocytosis. The professional phagocytes include many types of white blood cells (such as neutrophils, monocytes, macrophages, mast cells, and dendritic cells). The main difference between professional and non-professional phagocytes is that the professional phagocytes have molecules called receptors on their surfaces that can detect harmful objects, such as bacteria, that are not normally found in the body. Phagocytes are crucial in fighting infections, as well as in maintaining healthy tissues by removing dead and dying cells that have reached the end of their lifespan. During an infection, chemical signals attract phagocytes to places where the pathogen has invaded the body. These chemicals may come from bacteria or from other phagocytes already present. The phagocytes move by a method called chemotaxis. When phagocytes come into contact with bacteria, the receptors on the phagocyte's surface will bind to them. This binding will lead to the engulfing of the bacteria by the phagocyte. Some phagocytes kill the ingested pathogen with oxidants and nitric oxide. After phagocytosis, macrophages and dendritic cells can also participate in antigen presentation, a process in which a phagocyte moves parts of the ingested material back to its surface. This material is then displayed to other cells of the immune system. Some phagocytes then travel to the body's lymph nodes and display the material to white blood cells called lymphocytes. This process is important in building immunity, and many pathogens have evolved methods to evade attacks by phagocytes. The Russian zoologist Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (1845–1916) first recognized that specialized cells were involved in defense against microbial infections. In 1882, he studied motile (freely moving) cells in the larvae of starfishes, believing they were important to the animals' immune defenses. To test his idea, he inserted small thorns from a tangerine tree into the larvae. After a few hours he noticed that the motile cells had surrounded the thorns. Mechnikov traveled to Vienna and shared his ideas with Carl Friedrich Claus who suggested the name 'phagocyte' (from the Greek words phagein, meaning 'to eat or devour', and kutos, meaning 'hollow vessel') for the cells that Mechnikov had observed. A year later, Mechnikov studied a fresh water crustacean called Daphnia, a tiny transparent animal that can be examined directly under a microscope. He discovered that fungal spores that attacked the animal were destroyed by phagocytes. He went on to extend his observations to the white blood cells of mammals and discovered that the bacterium Bacillus anthracis could be engulfed and killed by phagocytes, a process that he called phagocytosis. Mechnikov proposed that phagocytes were a primary defense against invading organisms. In 1903, Almroth Wright discovered that phagocytosis was reinforced by specific antibodies that he called opsonins, from the Greek opson, 'a dressing or relish'. Mechnikov was awarded (jointly with Paul Ehrlich) the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on phagocytes and phagocytosis. Although the importance of these discoveries slowly gained acceptance during the early twentieth century, the intricate relationships between phagocytes and all the other components of the immune system were not known until the 1980s. Phagocytosis is the process of taking in particles such as bacteria, parasites, dead host cells, and cellular and foreign debris by a cell. It involves a chain of molecular processes. Phagocytosis occurs after the foreign body, a bacterial cell, for example, has bound to molecules called 'receptors' that are on the surface of the phagocyte. The phagocyte then stretches itself around the bacterium and engulfs it. Phagocytosis of bacteria by human neutrophils takes on average nine minutes. Once inside this phagocyte, the bacterium is trapped in a compartment called a phagosome. Within one minute the phagosome merges with either a lysosome or a granule to form a phagolysosome. The bacterium is then subjected to an overwhelming array of killing mechanisms and is dead a few minutes later. Dendritic cells and macrophages are not so fast, and phagocytosis can take many hours in these cells. Macrophages are slow and untidy eaters; they engulf huge quantities of material and frequently release some undigested back into the tissues. This debris serves as a signal to recruit more phagocytes from the blood. Phagocytes have voracious appetites; scientists have even fed macrophages with iron filings and then used a small magnet to separate them from other cells.