Abstract
Ectotherms choose the best thermal conditions to mount a successful immune response, a phenomenon known as behavioral fever. The cumulative evidence suggests that behavioral fever impacts positively upon lymphocyte proliferation, inflammatory cytokine expression, and other immune functions. In this study, we have explored how thermal choice during infection impacts upon underpinning molecular processes and how temperature increase is coupled to the immune response. Our results show that behavioral fever results in a widespread, plastic imprint on gene regulation, and lymphocyte proliferation. We further explored the possible contribution of histone modification and identified global associations between temperature and histone changes that suggest epigenetic remodeling as a result of behavioral fever. Together, these results highlight the critical importance of thermal choice in mobile ectotherms, particularly in response to an infection, and demonstrate the key role of epigenetic modification to orchestrate the thermocoupling of the immune response during behavioral fever.
Highlights
Thermoregulatory behavior is a critical factor influencing the functional responses of individuals in aquatic environments [1]
It has recently been shown that some viruses carry genes that inhibit the fever response to increase their growth [9, 10], or as in the case of Neisseria meningitidis, the increase of the temperature leads to expression of mechanisms to avoid the host immune responses that are triggered during fever [11]
The results suggest that the infectious pancreatic necrosis virus (IPNv) challenged group with access to a thermal gradient tank preferably chose the warm chambers (n°= 5 and 6) and the unchallenged fish prefer chambers 3 and 4
Summary
Thermoregulatory behavior is a critical factor influencing the functional responses of individuals in aquatic environments [1] It remains unknown how ectothermic vertebrates regulate thermal preference, where central thermostats are located in the brain and how variations in thermal choice impact upon molecular and cellular interactions [2,3,4]. This does not involve that fever has an adaptive impact, but that it can have a key incidence on the survival depending on the specific pathological conditions [7] where a balance between the killing of invading pathogens and the specific molecular/ cellular response of each tissue have to be taken into account [8]. Behavioral fever in response to pathogen challenge has been shown in fish as a response to bacterial (tilapia), cytokine (trout), and viral pathogens (carp, zebrafish), in lizards as a response to lipopolysaccharide (LPS) of bacterial wall of Escherichia coli [19] and invertebrates highlighting the evolutionary importance of this response in ectotherms [20,21,22,23]
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