出版社：American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
摘要：Atherosclerosis is now widely recognized as a chronic inflammatorydisease that involves innate and adaptive immune responses.Both cellular and humoral components of the immune system havebeen implicated in atherogenesis. Natural antibodies can beconsidered humoral factors of innate immunity, and their functionalrole in health and disease has been reexamined in recent years.Natural antibodies exhibit a remarkably conserved repertoirethat includes a broad specificity for self-antigens. For thisreason, they are believed to be a product of natural selectionand have been suggested to play an important role in "housekeeping"functions. Recent evidence has revealed that oxidation-specificepitopes are important and maybe immunodominant targets of naturalantibodies, suggesting an important function for these antibodiesin the host response to consequences of oxidative stress, forexample, to the oxidative events that occur when cells undergoapoptosis.
This review will focus on these recent findings and discussthe emerging evidence for an important role of natural antibodiesin atherogenesis.Supplementary key words B-1 cell • innate immunity • apoptosis • atherosclerosis
