Effector Specificity and Function in Drosophila Innate Immunity: Getting AMPed and Dropping Boms.

Our understanding of Drosophila innate immunity has seen major advances in the last five years, catalyzed by two transformative technologies—genome editing and genome-wide association studies—as well as by insights gained from the parallel study of pathogen growth and host survival following infection. As a result, researchers have characterized novel and essential effectors, rewritten the individual and collective roles of antimicrobial peptides, and identified stochastic variation and persistent infection as common features of microbial infection. We focus here on the inducible cell-free response of Drosophila melanogaster to bacterial or fungal pathogens. Readers interested in innate immunity in other insects, defenses in the gut and other organs, cellular immunity, or antiviral mechanisms are encouraged to consult recent reviews on these topics [1–6].