Butler J E
Department of Microbiology, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City, IA 52242-1109, USA.
Anim Health Res Rev. 2009 Jun;10(1):35-52. doi: 10.1017/S1466252308001618. Epub 2009 Feb 10.
The postnatal period is a 'critical window', a time when innate and passive immunity protect the newborn mammal while its own adaptive immune system is developing. Neonatal piglets, especially those reared in isolators, provide valuable tools for studying immunological development during this period, since environmental factors that cause ambiguity in studies with conventional animals are controlled by the experimenter. However, these models have limited value unless the swine immune system is first characterized and the necessary immunological reagents developed. Characterization has revealed numerous features of the swine immune system that did not fit mouse paradigms but may be more generally true for most mammals. These include fetal class switch recombination that is uncoupled from somatic hypermutation, the relative importance of the molecular mechanisms used to develop the antibody repertoire, the role of gut lymphoid tissue in that process, and the limited heavy chain repertoire but diverse IgG subclass repertoire. Knowledge gained from studies of adaptive immunity in isolator-reared neonatal pigs suggests that isolator piglets can be valuable in identification of virulence factors that are often masked in studies using conventional animals.
出生后时期是一个“关键窗口”，在此期间，先天性和被动免疫在新生哺乳动物自身适应性免疫系统发育时保护着它。新生仔猪，尤其是那些在隔离器中饲养的仔猪，为研究这一时期的免疫发育提供了有价值的工具，因为在对传统动物的研究中造成混淆的环境因素可由实验者控制。然而，除非首先对猪免疫系统进行表征并开发出必要的免疫试剂，否则这些模型的价值有限。表征揭示了猪免疫系统的许多特征，这些特征不符合小鼠模式，但可能对大多数哺乳动物更具普遍意义。这些特征包括与体细胞高频突变脱钩的胎儿类别转换重组、用于产生抗体库的分子机制的相对重要性、肠道淋巴组织在该过程中的作用，以及有限的重链库但多样的IgG亚类库。从对隔离饲养的新生仔猪适应性免疫的研究中获得的知识表明，隔离仔猪在识别在使用传统动物的研究中常常被掩盖的毒力因子方面可能很有价值。
