Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe hypersensitivityDefine autoimmunity

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder, or NMOSD, is a rare auto-immune demyelinating disease of the central nervous system. Now considered a separate disorder from multiple sclerosis, NMOSD can be severely disabling and life-threatening, with a reported mortality of between 7 and 32%. The hallmark of the disease is recurrent attacks of optic neuritis and/or transverse myelitis that result in accumulating, irreversible disability, including blindness and paraplegia. Approximately 75 to 90% of patients with NMOSD have a disease-specific, pathogenic IgG autoantibody against the aquaporin-4 water channel, or AQP4. This antibody is thought to bind to AQP4 on astrocyte foot processes at the blood-brain barrier. This causes damage to astrocytes and the blood-brain barrier itself through several mechanisms, including the formation of the membrane attack complex through activation of the complement component C5b9..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2, has spread rapidly since 2019. COVID-19 symptoms are mild in some patients but severe and even life-threatening in others and there are still no reliable treatments for severe COVID-19. In a recent study, researchers investigated the factors related to COVID-19 severity in hospitalized patients with mild or severe illness. Specifically, they investigated the patients’ immune characteristics and signaling pathways involving immune proteins called IFN-Is. Compared with healthy controls, patients with COVID-19 had lower counts of many types of immune cells but higher counts of Th17 cells in their blood and the differences were more drastic in patients with severe disease. In addition, individuals with severe COVID-19 had much lower levels of IFN-I signaling molecules than healthy controls..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.