• Question: Favourite part of the immune system?

    Asked by samlew on 26 Feb 2025.
    • Photo: Charles Michie

      Charles Michie answered on 26 Feb 2025:

      Hmmmm, I’ve never really thought about that before. White blood cells I think

    • Photo: Zoe Vance

      Zoe Vance answered on 26 Feb 2025:

      There’s a thing some white blood cells do called phagocytosis, where they consume things like bacteria and it looks really cool under the microscope, so probably that! You can look up videos of these cells chasing bacteria and swallowing them up.

    • Photo: Rachael Eggleston

      Rachael Eggleston answered on 4 Mar 2025:

      I’m a big fan of memory B cells (I think that’s their name)! They’re the ones that ‘remember’ what the surface proteins of specific bacteria/viruses look like, so if you ever get the same type of disease again, they can recognize the protein and tell the rest of the immune system how to fight the disease quicker next time! (This is, in part, how vaccines work, and why kids tend to get sick more often than adults- their memory B cells don’t know/remember as many diseases)

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