By Dillon Lim - Medicine Student @ Brasenose College, Oxford
Many common human pathogens are bacteria: prokaryotic cells characterised by their circular chromosome and peptidoglycan cell walls, among other features. Bacterial pathogens have co-evolved with their human hosts over millennia, such that just as we have evolved many ways to fight off bacterial infection, bacteria have evolved many ways to escape our immune system. We’ll look at just some of the common ways in this article.
Molecular mimicry is a term used to describe the way that some bacteria express molecules on th