Course 1 of a four course specialization called Fundamentals of Immunology: Innate Immunity and B-cell Function. Each course in the specialization presents material that builds on the previous course's material.

This is the first leg of a four-part journey through the defenses your body uses to keep you healthy. In this part, we hope to give you the vocabulary and concepts you need to interact with the medical community and provide them with a context that makes them memorable. Fundamentals of Immunology: Innate Immunity and B-cell Function introduces students to the basic functions of the adaptive and innate immune systems. The early lectures survey cells, tissues, and organs using metaphors, cartoons, and models to improve understanding and retention. After describing the form, function, origin, and varieties of antibodies, subsequent lectures provide details on the mechanism of the generation of variation. The course provides animations of gene rearrangement and class switching and descriptions of affinity maturation correlated with detailed physical models of antibody structure. The final lecture reviews these concepts in an anatomical context. Testing employs multiple choice questions testing facts, concepts, and application of principles. Questions may refer to diagrams, drawings, and photographs used in the lecture and reproduced in the outline. What You’ll Learn: The difference between adaptive and innate immune systems, the characteristics of various pathogens that they protect you from, and the overall strategies employed in this protection. The detailed structure of antibodies and related immunoglobulin receptors, the characteristics and function of the different antibody classes, and the mechanism for producing both the recognition regions and stem regions.  Finally, how these structures are coded for in the DNA and expressed in the B cells.