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The following is an excerpt from a great article from T Nation 'Managing Inflammation':

Inflammation is big business. With an aging population seeking to live a long and pain-free life, pharmaceutical companies are hard at work developing drugs to combat the many faces of inflammation. But this stuff isn't just for old folks – young bucks looking to get bigger and stronger can benefit as well.

Inflammation is the body's first response to an injury or infection. It was originally defined by the Latin words calor, dolor, rubor, and tumor, which mean heat, pain, redness, and swelling, respectively. What's interesting is the pain, redness, and swelling aren't directly caused by the infection or injury, but the immune system's response to them.

When an inflammatory response is triggered, chemical messengers called cytokines are released. This causes local dilation of blood capillaries and the skin to warm and redden due to increased blood flow to the area. Dilation of the vasculature creates gaps between the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels, allowing blood plasma to leak into surrounding tissues. This expansion of fluid volume induces swelling, which leads to pain by putting more pressure on local nerve endings.

Cytokine release also makes vascular endothelial cells more "sticky," allowing white blood cells to attach and move from the blood into the inflamed tissue. To clear out any invading microorganisms and/or damaged tissue, white blood cells release substances that further increase inflammation and can cause local tissue damage, increasing pain.

While this all sounds like a very destructive process, acute inflammation is a normal part of life. The benefit of the temporary discomfort and swelling is that inflammation allows large numbers of immune cells to rapidly move into areas where they're needed to kill any invading microorganisms and begin the healing process.

So what about training soreness?