Abstract
A microbe becomes a pathogen by evading—to a greater or lesser extent—the immune defenses of its host. The mechanisms that have evolved for so doing are legion in number and striking in their diversity and ingenuity. They involve mechanisms to evade recognition by—and mechanisms to subvert the effector mechanisms of—both the innate and the adaptive immune response (see Table 1). All classes of infectious agents from the smallest viruses to helminth worms use these techniques albeit in somewhat different ways. An almost ubiquitous target for these subversion mechanisms is the complement system and it is with the subversion of complement by smallpox virus that the report in this issue of PNAS by Rosengard et al. (1) is concerned.
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