Expression Levels Of Immune-related Genes Research Articles

Sex-specific consequences of an induced immune response on reproduction in a moth.

BackgroundImmune response induction benefits insects in combatting infection by pathogens. However, organisms have a limited amount of resources available and face the dilemma of partitioning resources between immunity and other life-history traits. Since males and females differ in their life histories, sex-specific resource investment strategies to achieve an optimal immune response following an infection can be expected. We investigated immune response induction of females and males of Heliothis virescens in response to the entomopathogenic bacterium Serratia entomophila, and its effects on mating success and the female sexual signal.ResultsWe found that females had higher expression levels of immune-related genes after bacterial challenge than males. However, males maintained a higher baseline expression of immune-related genes than females. The increased investment in immunity of female moths was negatively correlated with mating success and the female sexual signal. Male mating success was unaffected by bacterial challenge.ConclusionsOur results show that the sexes differed in their investment strategies: females invested in immune defense after a bacterial challenge, indicating facultative immune deployment, whereas males had higher baseline immunity than females, indicating immune maintenance. Interestingly, these differences in investment were reflected in the mate choice assays. As female moths are the sexual signallers, females need to invest resources in their attractiveness. However, female moths appeared to invest in immunity at the cost of reproductive effort.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-015-0562-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Effects of chronic social defeat on splenic chemokine expression and myeloid cell infiltration into the brain

Dysregulation of the innate immune response has frequently been described in stress-associated psychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD). However the kinetics and cellular origin of cytokine and chemokine expression are not well understood. Aim of this study was to elucidate stress-induced changes in the immune response. After 2, 6, or 10 daily social defeats, animals were tested for social interaction behavior, expression levels of immune-related genes were assessed in brain and spleen tissues, and splenocytes and mononuclear cells isolated from the brain were analyzed by flow cytometry. Mice that developed social avoidance behavior showed a decreased expression of genes encoding C-C chemokines accompanied by a reduction in the percentages of activated T lymphocytes and reduced IFN-gamma expression levels in the spleens of defeated mice. Also, diminished percentages of CD4+FoxP3+ regulatory T cells and lower TGF-beta mRNA levels accumulated in the spleens of these animals. In contrast, enhanced percentages of CD45hiCD11b+ cells representing peripheral myeloid cells immigrated into the brain of defeated animals. In summary, stress induced social avoidance was accompanied by an altered expression of CC chemokine genes and reduced T cell activation in the spleen, associated with an increased brain invasion of myeloid cells. Further studies will address the underlying molecular mechanisms, the cell types involved herein and in a translational approach the immune cell phenotype in patients with MDD.

Altered myeloid and lymphoid immune cell responses following repeated social defeat stress

Dysregulation of the innate immune response has frequently been described in stress-associated psychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD). However the kinetics and cellular origin of cytokine and chemokine expression are not well understood. Aim of this study was to elucidate stress-induced changes in the immune response in mice. After 2, 6, or 10 daily social defeats, mice were tested for social interaction, expression levels of immune-related genes were assessed in brain and spleen tissues, and splenocytes and mononuclear cells isolated from the brain were analyzed by flow cytometry. Mice that developed social avoidance showed a decreased expression of genes encoding C-C chemokines accompanied by a reduction in the percentages of activated T lymphocytes and reduced IFN-γ expression levels in the spleens of defeated mice. Also, diminished percentages of CD4+FoxP3+ regulatory T cells (Treg) and lower TGF-beta mRNA levels accumulated in the spleens of these animals. In contrast, enhanced percentages of CD45hiCD11b+ cells representing peripheral myeloid cells immigrated into the brain of defeated animals. In summary, stress induced social avoidance was accompanied by an altered expression of CC chemokine genes and reduced T cell activation in the spleen, associated with an increased brain invasion of myeloid cells. Further studies will address the underlying molecular mechanisms, the cell types involved, and the immune cell phenotype in patients with MDD. This study was supported by Innovative Medizinische Forschung (IMF AM211307)

Differential gene expression profiling of porcine epithelial cells infected with three enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli strains

BackgroundEnterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is one of the most important pathogenic bacteria causing severe diarrhoea in human and pigs. In ETEC strains, the fimbrial types F4 and F18 are commonly found differently colonized within the small intestine and cause huge economic losses in the swine industry annually worldwide. To address the underlying mechanism, we performed a transcriptome study of porcine intestinal epithelial cells (IPEC-J2) with and without infection of three representative ETEC strains.ResultsA total 2443, 3493 and 867 differentially expressed genes were found in IPEC-J2 cells infected with F4ab ETEC (CF4ab), with F4ac ETEC (CF4ac) and with F18ac ETEC (CF18ac) compared to the cells without infection (control), respectively. The number of differentially expressed genes between CF4ab and CF4ac, CF4ab and CF18ac, and CF4ac and CF18ac were 77, 1446 and 1629, respectively. The gene ontology and pathway analysis showed that the differentially expressed genes in CF4abvs control are significantly involved in cell-cycle progress and amino acid metabolism, while the clustered terms of the differentially expressed genes in CF4acvs control comprise immune, inflammation and wounding response and apoptosis as well as cell cycle progress and proteolysis. Differentially expressed genes between CF18acvs control are mainly involved in cell-cycle progression and immune response. Furthermore, fundamental differences were observed in expression levels of immune-related genes among the three ETEC treatments, especially for the important pro-inflammatory molecules, including IL-6, IL-8, TNF-α, CCL20, CXCL2 etc.ConclusionsThe discovery in this study provides insights into the interaction of porcine intestinal epithelial cells with F4 ETECs and F18 ETEC, respectively. The genes induced by ETECs with F4 versus F18 fimbriae suggest why ETEC with F4 may be more virulent compared to F18 which seems to elicit milder effects.

High-Throughput Sequence Analysis of Turbot (Scophthalmus maximus) Transcriptome Using 454-Pyrosequencing for the Discovery of Antiviral Immune Genes

BackgroundTurbot (Scophthalmus maximus L.) is an important aquacultural resource both in Europe and Asia. However, there is little information on gene sequences available in public databases. Currently, one of the main problems affecting the culture of this flatfish is mortality due to several pathogens, especially viral diseases which are not treatable. In order to identify new genes involved in immune defense, we conducted 454-pyrosequencing of the turbot transcriptome after different immune stimulations.Methodology/Principal FindingsTurbot were injected with viral stimuli to increase the expression level of immune-related genes. High-throughput deep sequencing using 454-pyrosequencing technology yielded 915,256 high-quality reads. These sequences were assembled into 55,404 contigs that were subjected to annotation steps. Intriguingly, 55.16% of the deduced protein was not significantly similar to any sequences in the databases used for the annotation and only 0.85% of the BLASTx top-hits matched S. maximus protein sequences. This relatively low level of annotation is possibly due to the limited information for this specie and other flatfish in the database. These results suggest the identification of a large number of new genes in turbot and in fish in general. A more detailed analysis showed the presence of putative members of several innate and specific immune pathways.Conclusions/SignificanceTo our knowledge, this study is the first transcriptome analysis using 454-pyrosequencing for turbot. Previously, there were only 12,471 EST and less of 1,500 nucleotide sequences for S. maximus in NCBI database. Our results provide a rich source of data (55,404 contigs and 181,845 singletons) for discovering and identifying new genes, which will serve as a basis for microarray construction, gene expression characterization and for identification of genetic markers to be used in several applications. Immune stimulation in turbot was very effective, obtaining an enormous variety of sequences belonging to genes involved in the defense mechanisms.

Identification of Genes Associated with Inhibitor Development in Hemophilia a by Microarray Analysis.

The risk of factor VIII (FVIII) inhibitor development increases by the disease severity, presence of family history and patient-related environment. Recently, FVIII genotypes and genes related to immune response were found to be decisive risk factors for inhibitor development. To identify the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) for developing inhibitory antibodies in hemophilia A, we analyzed the gene expression profiles between inhibitor and non-inhibitor by microarray technique. The results show that the 384 genes were up-regulated and 161 genes were down-regulated in inhibitor patients as compared with non-inhibitor patients. The 545 of DEGs were classified by the functional gene grouping using Panther classification method. Of interest was the finding that the expression levels of immunity and signal transduction related genes were significantly modified in inhibitor patients. For 7 genes, validation of these bead-array data was carried out by semi-quantitative RT-PCR. Finally, we performed Real Time PCR analysis for the significantly changed DEG450. As a result, expression of DEG450 was significantly down-regulated in inhibitor patients. We demonstrate that inhibitor development is closely related to the expression levels of immune-related genes and that these genes can be used as biomarker genes for prediction of inhibitor development