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44 results for “social immunity”
Dataset - Targeted social immunity is associated with a pathogen-specific erosion of individual immune function in the black garden ant
<p>Datasets and code used to generate the figures. Files sorted by figure panel number. <a href="../api/records/12820609/draft/files/Videos_grooming_.zip/content" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Videos_grooming_.zip</a> contains the original videos used for the grooming analysis. </p>
Data and code for Symbiotic bacteria, immune-like sentinel cells, and the response to pathogens in a social amoeba
<p>This repository contains data and code to do the analyses in the paper "Symbiotic bacteria, immune-like sentinel cells, and the response to pathogens in a social amoeba" published in Royal Society Open Science. The paper investigates how infection by <em>Paraburkholderia</em> symbionts affects host <em>Dictyostelium discoideum</em>'s immune function.</p>
Targeted social immunity is associated with a pathogen-specific erosion of individual immune function in ants - dataset
<p>Complete dataset of quantitative data and R scripts used to generate the figures and statistics of the publication, sorted by figure panel number. Information about data structure are including in the scripts. </p>
Impaired immune function accompanies social evolution in spiders
<p><span>An efficient immune system is essential to the survival of many animals. Sociality increases risk of pathogen transmission, which should select for enhanced immune function. However, two hypotheses instead predict a weakened immune function: relaxed selection caused by social immunity/protection, and reduced efficacy of selection due to inbreeding, reproductive skew, and female bias in social species that reduces effective population size and accelerate genetic drift. We assessed the effect of social evolution on immune function in a comparative study of two social spider species and their closely related subsocial sister species (genus <em>Stegodyphus</em>). The haemolymph of social species was less efficient in inhibiting the growth of potentially pathogenic bacteria than that of subsocial species. Reduced efficacy of selection in social species was supported by comparative genomic analysis of immune genes showing substantially elevated non-synonymous substitutions in one of the social species. We propose that this impaired immune function is likely to be a result of reduced efficacy of selection because the evolution of sociality in spiders is accompanied by demographic processes that elevate genetic drift. There may also be positive feedback between pathogen-induced local extinctions and the resulting elevation of genetic drift which further weakens responses to selection by pathogens.</span></p>
Immune challenge changes social behaviour in the Guppy (Poecilia reticulata)
<p>Increased exposure to pathogens is often considered to be one of the most significant costs of group living. As a result, animals typically avoid close association with individuals that manifest symptoms of disease. The question remains, however, whether avoidance behaviours are mediated by effects relating specifically to the disease itself, or through recognition of more general sickness behaviours that emerge from the activity of the immune system in response to infection. Here we examined the effects of an immune challenge, induced through exposure to bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS), on individual and social behaviour in female guppies (<em>Poecilia reticulata</em>). We found that in a binary choice presentation, healthy focal individuals showed a strong preference to associate with stimulus shoals of saline-injected fish rather than stimulus shoals of LPS-injected fish. In a subsequent examination of group-level dynamics, shoals of LPS-injected females were more dispersed than similar shoals comprised of control fish, and showed less coherent collective behaviour despite the lack of any obvious difference in general activity between LPS and control fish. We discuss these findings in relation to the need for social animals to mitigate the risk of disease that is associated with living in proximity to conspecifics.</p>
Data from: Inducible versus constitutive social immunity: examining effects of colony infection on glucose oxidase and defensin-1 production in honeybees
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Data from: Evolution of personal and social immunity in the context of parental care
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Impaired immune function accompanies social evolution in spiders
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Data from: Social immunity in a supercolonial invasive ant: Nest structure confers immune function
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Immune challenge changes social behaviour in the Guppy (Poecilia reticulata)
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Data from: Social effects on age-related and sex-specific immune cell profiles in a wild mammal
<p>Evidence for age-related changes in innate and adaptive immune responses is increasing in wild populations. Such changes have been linked to fitness, and knowledge of the factors driving immune response variation is important for understanding the evolution of immunity. Age-related changes in immune profiles may be due to factors such as immune system development, sex-specific behaviour and responses to environmental conditions. Social environments may also contribute to variation in immunological responses, for example, through transmission of pathogens and stress arising from resource and mate competition. Yet, the impact of the social environment on age-related changes in immune cell profiles is currently understudied in the wild. Here, we tested the relationship between leukocyte cell composition (proportion of neutrophils and lymphocytes [innate and adaptive immunity, respectively] that were lymphocytes) and age, sex, and group size in a wild population of European badgers (<i>Meles meles</i>). We found that the proportion of lymphocytes in early-life was greater in males in smaller groups compared to larger groups, but with a faster age-related decline in smaller groups. In contrast, the proportion of lymphocytes in females was not significantly related to age or group size. Our results provide evidence of sex-specific age-related changes in immune cell profiles in a wild mammal, which are influenced by the social environment.</p>
Data from: Social context affects thermoregulation but not activity level during avian immune response
Determining how an animal's social context alters its immune responses will help us understand how pathogens impact individual health and spread within groups. Several studies have shown that group-housed animals can suppress components of the acute phase immune response, specifically sickness behaviors like lethargy. However, we do not know whether individuals alter sickness behaviors or other components of the acute phase response, including thermoregulation, in response to the infection status of other group members. We used automated radio telemetry on captive house sparrows (Passer domesticus) to test whether sickness behaviors and thermoregulation differed during immune challenge under 2 social contexts: 1) all of the flock inoculated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a non-replicating component of gram-negative bacterial cell walls, or 2) half of the flock inoculated. We predicted that with half of the flock inoculated, LPS-treated birds would be under more pressure to maintain competitive behaviors, so would suppress components of the acute phase response. As we predicted, LPS-inoculated birds showed less pronounced heterothermia (fever) when housed with a mixture of inoculated and healthy flockmates. In contrast, LPS-inoculated birds exhibited similar degrees of lethargy regardless of the infection status of their flockmates. Our results show that the infection status of an individual's social group did exert an effect on the acute phase response but surprisingly did not impact the expression of lethargy, a canonical sickness behavior. Determining the mechanisms underlying these responses will require testing additional social contexts with different ratios of infected to uninfected birds.
Data from: Fitness in invasive social wasps: the role of variation in viral load, immune response and paternity in predicting nest size and reproductive output
Within any one habitat, the relative fitness of organisms in a population can vary substantially. Social insects like the common wasp are among the most successful invasive animals, but show enormous variation in nest size and other fitness-related traits. Some of this variation may be caused by pathogens such as viruses that can have serious consequences in social insects, which range from reduced productivity to colony death. Both individual immune responses and colony-level traits such as genetic diversity are likely to influence effects of pathogen infections on colony fitness. Here we investigate how infections with Kashmir Bee Virus (KBV), immune response and intracolony genetic diversity (due to queen polyandry) affect nest size in the invasive common wasp, Vespula vulgaris. We show that KBV is highly prevalent in wasps and expression of antiviral immune genes is significantly increased with higher viral loads across individuals. Patriline membership within a nest did not influence KBV susceptibility or immune response. A permutational MANCOVA revealed that polyandry, viral load, and expression of the immune gene Dicer were significant predictors of variation in nest size. High intracolony genetic diversity due to polyandry has previously been hypothesized to improve colony-level resistance to parasites and pathogens. Consistent with this hypothesis, we observed genetically diverse colonies to be significantly larger and to produce more queens, although this effect was not driven by the pathogen we investigated. Invasive wasps clearly suffer from pathogens and expend resources, as indicated here by elevated immune gene expression, toward reducing pathogen-impact on colony fitness.
Data from: Social effects on age-related and sex-specific immune cell profiles in a wild mammal
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Data from: Fitness in invasive social wasps: the role of variation in viral load, immune response and paternity in predicting nest size and reproductive output
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Data from: Social context affects thermoregulation but not activity level during avian immune response
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Data from: Interactive effects of social environment, age and sex on immune responses in Drosophila melanogaster
Social environments have been shown to have multiple effects on individual immune responses. For example, increased social contact might signal greater infection risk and prompt a prophylactic upregulation of immunity. This differential investment of resources may in part explain why social environments affect ageing and lifespan. Our previous work using Drosophila melanogaster showed that single-sex social contact reduced lifespan for both sexes. Here, we assess how social interactions (isolation or contact) affect susceptibility to infection, phagocytotic activity and expression of a subset of immune and stress related genes in young and old flies of both sexes. Social contact had a neutral, or even improved, effect on post-infection lifespan in older flies and reduced the expression of stress response genes in females, however it reduced phagocytotic activity. Together, these findings indicate that social contact in D. melanogaster does not have a predictable impact on immune responses and does not simply trade-off immune investment with lifespan.
Social immunity modulates competition between coinfecting pathogens
<p>Coinfections with multiple pathogens can result in complex within-host dynamics affecting virulence and transmission. Whilst multiple infections are intensively studied in solitary hosts, it is so far unresolved how social host interactions interfere with pathogen competition, and if this depends on coinfection diversity. We studied how the collective disease defenses of ants – their social immunity – influence pathogen competition in coinfections of same or different fungal pathogen species. Social immunity reduced virulence for all pathogen combinations, but interfered with spore production only in different-species coinfections. Here, it decreased overall pathogen sporulation success, whilst simultaneously increasing co-sporulation on individual cadavers and maintaining a higher pathogen diversity at the community-level. Mathematical modeling revealed that host sanitary care alone can modulate competitive outcomes between pathogens, giving advantage to fast-germinating, thus less grooming-sensitive ones. Host social interactions can hence modulate infection dynamics in coinfected group members, thereby altering pathogen communities at the host- and population-level.</p>
Data from: Feces production as a form of social immunity in an insect with facultative maternal care
Background: Social animals have the unique capability of mounting social defenses against pathogens. Over the last decades, social immunity has been extensively studied in species with obligatory and permanent forms of social life. However, its occurrence in less derived social systems and thus its role in the early evolution of group-living remains unclear. Here, we investigated whether lining nests with feces is a form of social immunity against microbial growth in the European earwig Forficula auricularia, an insect with temporary family life and facultative maternal care. Results: Using a total of 415 inhibition zone assays, we showed that earwig feces inhibit the growth of two GRAM+ bacteria, two fungi, but not of a GRAM- bacteria. These inhibitions did not result from the consumed food or the nesting environment. We then demonstrated that the antimicrobial activity against fungus was higher in offspring than maternal feces, but that this difference was absent against bacteria. Finally, we showed that family interactions inhibited the antibacterial activity of maternal frass against one of the two GRAM+ bacteria, whereas they had no effect on the one of nymphal frass. By contrast, antifungal activities of the frass were independent of mother-offspring interactions. Conclusion: These results demonstrate that social immunity occurs in a species with simple and facultative social life, and thus shed light on the general importance of this process in the evolution of group-living. These results also emphasize that defecation can be under selection for other life-history traits than simple waste disposal.
Data from: No evidence for social immunity in co-founding queen associations
Ant queens often associate to found new colonies, yet the benefits of this behaviour remain unclear. A major hypothesis is that queens founding in groups are protected by social immunity and can better resist disease than solitary queens, due to mutual grooming, sharing of antimicrobials, or higher genetic diversity among their workers. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating the number of queens in incipient colonies of Lasius niger and measuring their resistance to the fungal entomopathogen Metarhizium brunneum. We found no evidence for social immunity in associations of founding queens. First, co-founding queens engaged in self-grooming, but performed very little allo-grooming or trophallaxis. Second, co-founding queens did not exhibit higher pathogen resistance than solitary queens, and their respective workers did not differ in disease resistance. Finally, queens founding in groups increased their investment in a component of individual immunity, as expected if they do not benefit from social immunity but respond to a higher risk of disease. Overall, our results provide no evidence that joint colony founding by L. niger queens increases their ability to resist fungal pathogens.
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Allen Brain Atlas
Allen Brain Atlas is an Allen Institute collection of brain map atlases, datasets, APIs, and analysis tools covering mouse, human, and non-human primate brain resources.
Annotated Behaviour and Observability Dataset (ABODe)
ABODe is a University of Edinburgh DataShare dataset for behavior classification in group-housed mice using home-cage video, identities, bounding boxes, ground-plate positions, and annotator labels.
DANDI Archive for NWB datasets
DANDI is a BRAIN Initiative archive for publishing and sharing neurophysiology data, including electrophysiology, optophysiology, and behavioral data packaged as NWB and related standards.
International Brain Laboratory public data
The International Brain Laboratory public data releases expose standardized mouse decision-making experiments, including Neuropixels recordings, widefield calcium imaging, behavior, and session metadata accessed through the ONE API.
OpenNeuro
OpenNeuro is a free, open platform for sharing neuroimaging datasets, with public search, dataset pages, and download paths for web, S3, DataLad, and the OpenNeuro CLI.