inflammasome
kbonham | November 28, 2010If you've ever rolled your ankle (as I have many times), you have a visceral knowledge of inflammation. Clinically, inflammation is the redness, swelling, heat and pain that's associated with injury. From an immunologist's perspective, it's the set of molecular events that get the immune system going. All of the clinical systems associated with inflammation are due to increased vascular permeability, which is just a fancy way of saying leaky blood vessels. Actually, "leaky" implies that it's uncontrolled, when in fact there's a very orchestrated set of events that recruit immune cells and…