I just want to understand what exactly is the advantage of using one of those cells over the other.
*edit: my bad for the poor title, it’s supposed to be why does neutrophils attack first when T cells and macrophages are considerably stronger?
In: Biology
Some of your cells are nonspecific and there lots and lots of them. Killer T cells usually stay in reserve waiting to be triggered because you can’t have all of your T cells constantly roaming your blood looking for their targets because most of the time they’ll fail.
White blood cells is a group of cells which includes both macrophange cells and T-cells. Your question is like asking why fire trucks are the first ones to a fire when the best thing to fight a fire is pump trucks and ladder trucks.
So yeh it’s quite a long answer to give fully, I would recommend a good book or YouTube video on the subject, but essentially yes each of the white blood cells has certain advantages and disadvantages, which result in them being strategically used at different times/areas. Neutrophils are much better generally against a say bacterial infection, as it has much more and varied defensive capabilities which could tackle a wider range of infections, and much more deadly, their problem is that they’re so powerful that they are very likely to damage healthy cells around them, and so are less able to discriminate. So for that reason they have shorted life spans, and are rarely found in organs/important places, instead usually found in big pools waiting for a place to attack hard and fast first, before the slightly slower but more accurate macrophages can come and take over.
Time and distribution through the body is the answer, especially in the case of T cells.
Neutrophils are by far the most abundant immune cell. Loads and loads of them are in your blood at any given time. They’re also capable of a powerful immune response in their own right, mostly directed at bacteria. Macrophages are also present in the blood and in barrier tissues like the skin, but in lesser numbers. They have decent bacteria and virus-fighting potential in their own right, but play a more supportive role than the neutrophil. Finally, killer T cells take several days to arise in response to a particular pathogen (and work against viruses & other intracellular pathogens only), so oftentimes the threat is dead and gone well before these guys come crawling out of the lymph nodes.
I would say you think a bit too much in ‘textbook’ format. It’s not Neutrophils or Macrophages, it will be both of them and largely at the same time (Macrophages will persist though, while Neutrophil infiltration wanes quickly). Macrophages are usually dispersed quite well through barrier tissues like many mucous membranes and your skin but they do not move / migrate very quickly and you don’t have a large pool of them in the blood to be recruited quickly. In many cases, they are among the first cells to react to an infection becauae they are already there before the pathogen arrives. Neutrophils are not found in healthy tissues so need a bit longer because they need to immigrate. In exchange they are very powerful, essentially kill in a ‘suicide mission’ kind of way and are easily replaced. T cells are a bit different from Macrophages and Neutrophiles because they are part of the ‘adaptive’ immune system. They take the longest to respond because other cells (e.g. called dendritic cells) need to take up part of the virus/bacteria and take it to a Lymph node. They will ‘show’ it to T cells and ‘teach’ them to kill anything that looks like this. This process means that a good T cell response takes days to start whereas solid Neutrophil and Macrophages responses happen in minutes to hours. The advantage is a very strong response by T cells, very high specificity to certain pathogens and also a ‘training’ effect; some T cells which know this pathogen will survive in the blood and if you get the same infection again, will start to kill the invader extremely quickly and efficiently. This is partly how (some) vaccines work. So it’s the only one of these systems that possesses a ‘memory’ and will protect you better against a reinfection with the same virus/bacteria.
Latest Answers