Citizen Science
What is Your Immune System Seeing?
MyImmunity is a Citizen Science project meant to study adaptive immunity across diverse human and viral populations. In the process, we aim to help participants learn about their personal immune memory and how it changes over time.
Immune memory is what we call the accumulated knowledge of your adaptive immune system. (That's the portion of the immune system that learns from each infection and reacts more effectively the next time around.) When you receive a flu vaccine to protect yourself against the Influenza virus, what you're doing is showing your immune system a mugshot of the pathogen and teaching your adaptive immune system (i.e. your B and T cells) that it's dangerous. If you encounter Influenza naturally after being vaccinated against it, some of your B cells and T cells will "remember" having been warned about the flu and will respond much more swiftly and strongly than they would have without first being educated.
MyImmunity participants give us a valuable opportunity to learn more about human immunity and their unique immune systems. To find out more about the study, click on the "myimmunity.org" button.