New research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) has shown that nematode worms have to trade-off resistance to different diseases, gaining resistance to one microbe at the expense of becoming more vulnerable to another. This finding, published in PLoS ONE today (2 March 2011), reveals that the worms, called C. elegans, have a much more complex immune system than was previously thought and shows how important such trade-offs are across the animal kingdom.
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