Evolutionary biology: Researchers solve toll-receptor puzzle
Thursday, November 1, 2012 - 08:30
in Biology & Nature
The puzzle about the ancestral function of toll-receptors has been solved. For more than 25 years, researchers from medicine and biology have been studying toll-receptors, revealing functions in immune defence on the one hand and developmental biology on the other. A research team from Germany is now reporting that toll-receptors have primarily served to identify germs and to control bacterial colonisation of organisms -- typical immune defence functions.