Dear
@osisposis,
What you have to remember is that people are mostly like sheep. They have no new ideas so they just follow everyone else - they vote for Donald Trump or Mr Osborne's austerity despite both being close to suicide.
Immunologists are people and by and large they cannot think of any new ideas - or even work out which of the old ideas make sense - so they keep writing about an idea that is fifty years old and never made sense or was supported by any evidence.
This paper is drivel. The journal is of the sort that will publish anything anyone wants to pay for publishing (these days you pay journals to publish your stuff so they are happy to print nonsense and rake in the money.) There is actuually no experiment here. Moreover, the abstract is full of nonsense statements. Rheumatoid arthritis and lupus have nothing to do with mycobacteria. There might be debate about prevotella copra but at a rheumatology meeting of 3,000 scientists you are unlikely to find anyone who thinks it has anything to do with mycobacteria. The authors are just making things up as they go along.
What the paper shows is that if you walk on a beach and pick up a pebble, after five years of walking you are pretty sure to find another pebble that looks just the same. Or that if a child were to come up saying look I found two pebbles exactly the same you would conclude that God knew about the first pebble and made the second one to match. Put another way, if you drive two thousand miles you are bound to find two car number plates that are exactly the same apart from one number or letter.
What I think is hard for people to understand, and this is part of the reason why I post here, is just how bad most scientific papers are these days. This is the equivalent of some high school kids trying to work out whether there is a Higgs boson - without knowing any physics.
And what is so sad is that MOST immunologists, although they can see this is rubbish, cannot see why the molecular mimicry idea is rubbish, despite the fact that it is barn door obvious - and at least Marky90 gets it!
Our bodies are full of proteins. All the time these proteins are being slightly damaged and eventually cleared away once they are too damaged. Amino acids get oxidised or cross linked or glycated. And every self protein that has been slightly changed is now 'almost identical to self' and so if molecular mimicry worked our immune system would constantly be mounting immune responses to these damaged proteins that cross reacted with good proteins and gave us total autoimmunity every day of the week. It simply cannot make sense. And since there is essentially no evidence for an association between infection and autoimmune disease that would fit with mimicry nobody should be surprised.