What is innate immunity?

So what is innate immunity I bet you're asking? Well, it turns out that's a great quesiton. Innate immunity is the branch of the immune system that helps us fights off foreign invaders without having to have previously seen the pathogens. It is non-specific. The other side of the coin is the adaptive immune system which remember pathogens that have previously infected us, and can mount a very quick response specific to the pathogen. I study the innate branch of immunity and how it is intertwined into the aging process. To do so, I use the model organism fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. And just in case you're curious, I use fruit flies because they dont have an adaptive immune system, so it avoids the complicating interplay between the two systems.

Innate immunity was implicated in aging in 2001/2002 where several aging studies found that many immune related genes are upregulated with age (DeVeal et al. 2004). From this stemmed my project. I am infecting fruit flies with a dose of bacteria and monitoring their survival as well as how long it takes them to clear the infection. We hope to find out whether or not immune system functionality increases with age as the genes are upregulated.