Fitness consequences of immune responses: strengthening the empirical framework for ecoimmunology
Fitness consequences of immune responses: strengthening the empirical framework for ecoimmunology
复制标题
DOI：
10.1111/j.1365-2435.2010.01777.x
复制
发表时间：
2011-02-01
影响因子：
5.2
通讯作者：
Little, Tom J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Graham, Andrea L.;Shuker, David M.;Little, Tom J.
P>1。生态免疫学家旨在了解不同免疫防御策略的成本，收益和净适应性后果。测量免疫反应的适应性后果是困难的，部分原因是宿主适应性与寄生虫和免疫细胞或分子的宿主内密度之间的复杂关系。特别是，最强的免疫反应和最低的寄生虫密度都不一定能最大化宿主适应性。在这里，我们建议生态免疫学家应该经常努力测量三个相互交织的参数：宿主适应度，寄生虫密度和相关的免疫反应。我们进一步提出，这些性状之间的关系的分析将受益于用于分析的表型可塑性和/或方法，是强大的双向因果关系固有的宿主-寄生虫关系的统计机器。例如，分析宿主适应性如何取决于寄生虫密度，这是耐受性的进化生态学定义，将受益于这些更强大的方法。总之，这些步骤促进了对免疫反应的适应性后果的严格量化。如果生态免疫学家要破译自然界中免疫多态性的原因，并预测自然选择对免疫防御的轨迹，这种量化是必不可少的。
P>1. Ecoimmunologists aim to understand the costs, benefits, and net fitness consequences of different strategies for immune defense.2. Measuring the fitness consequences of immune responses is difficult, partly because of complex relationships between host fitness and the within-host density of parasites and immunological cells or molecules. In particular, neither the strongest immune responses nor the lowest parasite densities necessarily maximize host fitness.3. Here, we propose that ecoimmunologists should routinely endeavour to measure three intertwined parameters: host fitness, parasite density, and relevant immune responses. We further propose that analyses of relationships among these traits would benefit from the statistical machinery used for analyses of phenotypic plasticity and/or methods that are robust to the bi-directional causation inherent in host-parasite relationships. For example, analyses of how host fitness depends upon parasite density, which is an evolutionary ecological definition of tolerance, would benefit from these more robust methods.4. Together, these steps promote rigorous quantification of the fitness consequences of immune responses. Such quantification is essential if ecoimmunologists are to decipher causes of immune polymorphism in nature and predict trajectories of natural selection on immune defense.