Answer Happy

A) Innate immune response (non-specific recognition & phagocytosis) Aspergillus fumigatus is a mold that can take root and cause an infection of someone with a compromised immune system. It is an opportunistic pathogen, meaning it only will cause a disease if there is a loss of host defenses for some other reason. In the case file, the 5-year-old boy only developed aspergillosis because he had defective phagocytes. The chief role of phagocytes is to go to the site of an infection, engulf the invading pathogen, break it down so that it is destroyed, and expel it out, holding on to a piece of an antigen to present it to a cell of the adaptive immune system. The boy was eventually diagnosed with Chronic Granulomas Disease (CGD), a genetic disorder, in which the patient's phagocytes don't contain degradative chemicals in their lysosomes which kill and destroy pathogens, and thus they stop working, and many phagocytes end up stuck and more and more are brought and rendered useless, and build up in areas of the body, making a granuloma. *Make a diagram of the process of phagocytosis. Make sure to identify surface molecules that aid in recognition on both the pathogen and phagocyte. Then, draw an arrow that points to the exact stage in phagocytosis in which the phagocytes stop doing their job in a patient with CGD, and label it as such.