How do our cells and things know to do the thing, as in, attack things? How do they know whats a threat and whats not when it comes to things such as viruses/immune disease. Do they have brains? xD
In: Biology
They don’t have brains. But they are coordinated by your immune system that actually keeps track of what kind of attackers it knows. There are cells that are there just to identify the attacker and then produce antibodies as a tailored solution. They use different kind of information, from cell shape to genetic markers to decide if an object is a threat or not.
You don’t need a brain to make meaningful decisions, microorganisms can navigate, find food, and in some cases even chase it without a single neuron
For those that want more in-depth. Your cells have glycoproteins unique to you. Your immune cells won’t attack cells with those on it ( if this stops working disease: autoimmune disease).
You macrophage cells (somebody correct me) will eat things that don’t have the glycoproteins, and break them up. They pass the broken up bits to apc cells that then give it to B cells. B cells will then make anti body’s that will target virus. T cells will kill any B cell that make antibodies that target normal cells.
It’s the T cells that stop antibodies being made that attach your cells, and glycoproteins that stop your cells being phagocytosed.
as someone else already said, cells don’t have any type of brain, but what they have are proteins and cell receptors on their membrane and some (immune system cells) have the ability to, basically, read them.
The proteins show the state of any giving cell, so if the cell is dying the proteins will change, and if they’re infected with a virus they’ll present a different type of protein, if the immune system has already fought that virus (meaning at t cell already ate an infected cell) the they are able to recognize it for their protein and kill it before it spreads.
when the body is facing an infection that it has never seen, then we have the neck cells, that are able not only to read the simple changes like the normal t cells, but they’re also able to read almost any change on the cell receptors, to stop it. this no cell deal with cancerous cells as well, but they aren’t foolproof, sometimes they can fail and you get sick
There’s another scenario on which some viruses, stop the cell from represents information on its surface, but there is a type of t cells that are designed to attack the cell when they don’t show anything on their surface
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