The vaccine is made of mRNA. This is stuff that your cells make to build proteins in the cytoplasm (ie. not in the nucleus where the DNA resides). In this case the vaccine mRNA is manufactured (your cells don't normally produce this sequence).
To deliver the mRNA into a cell they have a process to cause a bacteria to uptake this mRNA. The bacteria is engineered to have a short life so it won't itself cause problems.
The bacteria is then injected into you and your usual immune cells attack the bacteria, envelope it and break it open. Now the mRNA in the bacteria is floating in your immune cell's cytoplasm.
The mRNA sequence will eventually attach to a ribosome where it will now be transcribed into a protein. That protein is the surface protein that resides on the virus.
Your immune cell will eventually recognize this new protein (it just manufactured )as foreign and present the protein on the surface of its cell membrane which will trigger your immune system to create antibodies.
An antibody will eventually attach to that surface protein and your immune system will start making more copies of that successful antibody. This gives you the antibodies to fight the virus itself.
usually the cell that presents this protein is also destroyed by the immune system. This means that only cells that attacked the bacteria will be involved in the process of manufacturing the protein in its cytoplasm and they will eventually die off or be killed by the immune system.
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It is pretty ingenious stuff. But it's an offshoot of how they produce vaccines like Flublok. This vaccine is a recombinant surface protein that they engineer a bacteria to create. They then separate the surface protein from the bacteria soup and make a vaccine. The bacteria has DNA modified but eventually has to produce the mRNA that will make the protein.
Somebody realized that if they could just inject the mRNA into a few cells the cells themselves will create the protein without the need for engineering a change in the cell's DNA. From there they would act just as they would if they ingested the virus and broke off one of the surface proteins.
>>> It is pretty ingenious stuff.
yeah.. so is growing human ears on mouse butts.
Not to dis your wonderful explanation.... it does sound fascinating....
But I just don’t trust them.
Thanks for the words. I’m curious as to why the MRNA doesn’t created a new DNA strand. Doesn’t the mRNA strand reproduce from the injected messenger? Pesky little ribosomes and proteins. I’ll have to re read my old histology.
Fascinating how that works!