GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Evolutionary Ecology of Marine Fishes, , Düsternbrooker Weg 20, Kiel 24105, Germany.
Biol Lett. 2013 Nov 20;9(6):20130864. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0864. Print 2013.
Specific immune priming enables an induced immune response upon repeated pathogen encounter. As a functional analogue to vertebrate immune memory, such adaptive plasticity has been described, for instance, in insects and crustaceans. However, towards the base of the metazoan tree our knowledge about the existence of specific immune priming becomes scattered. Here, we exposed the invasive ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi repeatedly to two different bacterial epitopes (Gram-positive or -negative) and measured gene expression. Ctenophores experienced either the same bacterial epitope twice (homologous treatments) or different bacterial epitopes (heterologous treatments). Our results demonstrate that immune gene expression depends on earlier bacterial exposure. We detected significantly different expression upon heterologous compared with homologous bacterial treatment at three immune activator and effector genes. This is the first experimental evidence for specific immune priming in Ctenophora and generally in non-bilaterian animals, hereby adding to our growing notion of plasticity in innate immune systems across all animal phyla.
特定免疫启动可在反复接触病原体时引发诱导免疫反应。作为脊椎动物免疫记忆的功能类似物，这种适应性可塑性已在昆虫和甲壳类动物中得到描述。然而，在后生动物树的基部，我们对特定免疫启动存在的了解变得分散。在这里，我们反复暴露于两种不同的细菌表位（革兰氏阳性或革兰氏阴性）的入侵栉水母 Mnemiopsis leidyi 并测量基因表达。栉水母经历了相同的细菌表位两次（同源处理）或不同的细菌表位（异源处理）。我们的结果表明，免疫基因表达取决于早期的细菌暴露。我们在三个免疫激活剂和效应基因上检测到异源细菌处理与同源细菌处理相比，表达显著不同。这是在栉水母中，并且通常在非双侧动物中特异性免疫启动的第一个实验证据，由此增加了我们对所有动物门中先天免疫系统可塑性的认识。
