White Blood Cells (WBCs)

What Are White Blood Cells (WBCs)?

Formal name = Leukocytes

1% of TOTAL blood volume

Much larger than red blood cells allow it to do its "job"

• Predominantly used to fight infections

5 major types with each type having its own discrete task to aid in your body's defense against infection

• Neutrophils

  • Particularly useful against bacteria and fungus

• Lymphocytes

  • Composed of:

    • B cells

    • T cells

    • Natural killer (NK) cells

  • Create antibodies to help fight infection

• Monocytes

  • Composed of

    • Macrophages

    • Dendritic cells

• Eosinophils

  • Particularly useful against larger parasites

  • Moderate allergy and inflammatory type responses

• Basophils

  • Particularly useful against bacteria and parasites

Now each of these have different jobs if you will and this gets enormously complex very quickly, so for the sake of simplicity I'll provide a couple of examples of what these specific cell types do

As an example:

• Neutrophils are primarily responsible for eating and breaking down pathogens through a process called phagocytosis - like pac-man eating things

• Lymphocytes are primarily responsible for recognizing microorganisms and creating antibodies to further fight and kill the microorganisms responsible for infection —> mechanism of vaccines