A team of investigators, led by Thomas Clanton, Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology, College of Health and Human Performance, demonstrated for the first time that skeletal muscles do indeed play an important but poorly understood role in immunity. These investigators specifically knocked out a protein in skeletal muscles called “Myd88′ that is essential for “toll like receptor” signaling, the primary way that cells sense the presence of pathogens or bacteria. As a result, the knockout mice had a greatly reduced immune response to septic shock, and the females had a reduced capacity to successfully fight the infection.