Innate immune sensing and its roots: the story of endotoxin.

ABSTRACT

How does the host sense pathogens? Our present concepts grew directly from longstanding efforts to understand infectious disease how microbes harm the host, what molecules are sensed and, ultimately, the nature of the receptors that the host uses. The discovery of the host sensors--the Toll-like receptors--was rooted in chemical, biological and genetic analyses that centred on a bacterial poison, termed endotoxin.