Presenter(s): Emily Niebergall—Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): William Cresko, Emily Beck
Session 4: Earning your Stripes
Understanding when the onset of the adaptive immune system occurs is important for understanding host-microbe interactions and etiology of disease . While the onset of adaptive immunity has been studied in inbred animal models, i .e . mice and zebrafish, these laboratory models lack the genetic diversity found in humans and may not be appropriate for all studies . We are advancing threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) as a novel outbred immunogenetics model to elucidate the complexities of these interactions in the context of genetic variation . It is currently unknown when adaptive immunity is onset in threespine stickleback . To pinpoint the timing of onset of adaptive immunity, we looked at the expression of an early adaptive immune gene known to be involved in T-lymphocyte development throughout a developmental time series . T-lymphocytes are a primary adaptive immune cells able to recognize and elicit a response against pathogens . Early development of these cells utilizes two interconnected protein complexes: CD3 and TCR . The pre-TCR/CD3 supercomplex has been used to study the ontogeny of the immune system and has provided insight into the development of the adaptive immune system . In this study, we chose to focus on cd3d, a gene involved in the CD3 complex . Similar work determining the onset of adaptive immunity in other fish has produced a wide range of results, from 72 hours post fertilization to 20 days post hatching (dph) . We found that by 10 dph, cd3d was expressed in all individuals, with population level variation indicating some may exhibit expression earlier in development .