The new antigenic ecospace of the globalized world and its impact on the immune system: The battleground of trade-off and antagonistic pleiotropy

Like almost all vertebrates, humans have developed a complex immune system, which evolved in an environment that prompted the development of sophisticated strategies of antigen recognition due to the necessity to discriminate relatively few pathogens among huge amounts of commensal microorganisms, and tolerate “self” antigens as well as food antigens. The universe of antigens that driven this evolution could be suggestively called “antigenic ecospace”. In this chapter, we will discuss how rapid changes in this ecospace due to its “globalization” as a consequence of new population and economic worldwide dynamics can impact on immune functions and eventually on health status of the individuals. Keywords