Innate immunity is one the most evolutionally conserved systems, designed to protect the organism from viruses and bacterial infections, stress and many other types of attacks from the outside world. During the past decade, the capacity of molecular biology and information technology to produce and analyse data have grown exponentially, rapidly reforming many aspects of immunology research in the post-genomics era. As a result, scientific understanding of signalling networks governing the innate immunity response in human tissues and other organisms has evolved beyond recognition, compared to...

Like many words, the term "immunomics" equates to different ideas contingent on context. For a brief span, immunomics meant the study of the Immunome, of which there were, in turn, several different definitions. A now largely defunct meaning rendered the Immunome as the set of antigenic peptides or immunogenic proteins within a single microorganism - be that virus, bacteria, fungus, or parasite - or microbial population, or antigenic or allergenic proteins and peptides derived from the environment as a whole, containing also proteins from eukaryotic sources. However, times have changed and...