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  3. New studies take the most comprehensive look yet into immune system activity immediately after birth. Much about the immune syst

New studies take the most comprehensive look yet into immune system activity immediately after birth. Much about the immune syst

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问题     New studies take the most comprehensive look yet into immune system activity immediately after birth. Much about the immune system has long been mysterious to scientists. Its activity is incredibly complicated and varies greatly between individuals; a deeper understanding of how the system works could lead to more and better vaccines, and even to a clearer distinction between health and disease.
    Now three studies report finding new patterns amid the apparent chaos—including in the crucial days just after birth, when the immune system faces many threats from the outside world for the first time.
    European researchers last year published an analysis of the immune systems of 100 infants— half born prematurely—between one and 12 weeks after birth. And in a study appearing laying a baseline for healthy immune system development by examining which genes, proteins and immune cells are active during a newborn’s first seven days. "Massive molecular changes are occurring across the first week of life," says Ofer Levy, a staff physician and director of the Precision Vaccines program at Boston Children’s Hospital, who helped lead the most recent study. "Over 1000 genes changing, many proteins changing, hundreds of metabolites—we’re talking about pretty radical shifts."
    Both of these studies—and a third that looks at the adult immune system—are part of a growing effort to understand not just the system’s pieces but how they fit together, says Petter Brodin, a pediatric immunologist and associate professor at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who was the senior author on last year’s paper. "The immune system is so complex; there are so many moving parts," Brodin says. "If we focus only on, let’s say, one type of cell or protein, we’re not going to be able to see how the system as a whole is wired, or how it’s regulated and functions in a given patient at a given time."
    Brodin adds he was surprised when his own research indicated babies’ immune systems respond to birth in similar ways, regardless of whether they are born full-term or premature. "Something happens when the child comes out and faces the environment for the very first time," he says. "There’s a lot of drastic changes happening." Brodin’s research shows bacteria rapidly colonize newborns’ digestive tracts, skin and lungs—which he says appears to be the "driving force" behind the changes. "We think that’s the trigger that happens after birth, which is the reason all of the children are responding so similarly, because they’re all colonized," he says. More research could help distinguish normal individual variation and determine how newborns with certain characteristics will fare later in childhood, he notes.
    In the study published this week, Levy and the other researchers in the international group compared two blood samples from each of 30 newborns in Gambia in west Africa, validating their findings in another 30 newborns halfway around the world in Papua New Guinea. They were able to get immense amounts of data on each child from only one milliliter of blood, which would not have been possible just a few years ago, says Levy, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School. Although the newborns showed a lot of variation in measures of gene, immune and metabolic activity, the team was surprised to find "core signatures" , he says, as the babies’ genetic and immune activities changed during the first week after birth. The study begins to set a baseline for immune behavior that will be useful for understanding how premature or sick babies differ from that norm, says Levy, whose team is now studying how vaccines affect this trajectory.
When does the immune system face many threats from the outside world for the first time?
选项 A、Before birth.
B、One month after birth.
C、In the crucial days just after birth.
D、The first week after birth.
答案C
解析 细节题。根据第二段中的“…including in the crucial days just after birth，when the immune system faces many threats from the outside world for the first time”可知，此处指的是婴儿出生后的数天之内，C项符合文意。
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