Comparative innate immunity in domestic large animals

传染性呼吸道和肠道疾病是猪、牛、马和其他牲畜生产者面临的主要问题。它们对健康的影响增加了生产成本和抗生素的使用，并对动物福利有害。抗病涉及受各种遗传和环境因素影响的先天和适应性免疫功能。我的研究项目的目的是鉴定和表征识别大型动物传染性病原体表面常见模式的蛋白质。这些蛋白质，包括胶原凝集素，在人类和动物的先天疾病抗性中起着关键作用，缺乏这些蛋白质已被证明会增加感染的风险和严重程度。我已经在猪身上发现了这些蛋白质中的一些，并发现遗传变异在患有肺炎和肠炎等常见经济上重要传染病的猪身上更为常见。我们对其他驯养的大型动物体内的这些蛋白质知之甚少。本研究将更好地确定模式识别分子在家畜先天抗病中的作用。我们将确定哪些蛋白质在猪、牛和马的先天疾病抗性中发挥作用。我们还将评估这些先天免疫因子中的遗传缺陷在牲畜中观察到的对传染病的抵抗力的广泛差异中所起的作用。这些研究将有助于进一步解释先天免疫功能的遗传或获得性改变如何影响感染和炎症性疾病的发展，其长期应用目标是开发用于选择面板的新型遗传标记以及畜牧业中使用的传统参数。这些比较研究也可能使人类受益，因为它们将提高对涉及先天抗病的复杂分子途径的理解，并阐明调节人类和生产动物共同的先天抗病的遗传机制。

Infectious respiratory and enteric diseases are major problems for producers of pigs, cattle, horses and other livestock. Their impacts on health increase production costs and antibiotic use, and are detrimental to animal welfare. Disease resistance involves innate and adaptive immune functions that are influenced by various genetic and environmental factors. The purpose of my research program is to identify and characterize proteins that recognize common patterns on the surfaces of infectious pathogens of large animals. These proteins, including collagenous lectins, play a key role in innate disease resistance in humans and animals, and deficiencies have been shown to increase the risk and severity of infections. I have identified some of these proteins in pigs and found genetic variations that are more frequent in pigs with common economically important infectious diseases such as pneumonia and enteritis. Much less is known about these proteins in other domesticated large animals. This research will better define the role that pattern recognition molecules play in innate disease resistance in livestock. We will identify which proteins play a role in innate disease resistance in pigs, cattle and horses. We will also assess the role genetic defects in these innate immune factors play in the wide variation in resistance to infectious diseases observed in livestock. These studies will help to further explain how genetic or acquired alterations in innate immune functions influence infection and inflammatory disease development, with a long-term applied goal of developing novel genetic markers for use in selection panels along with traditional parameters used in the livestock industry. These comparative studies may also benefit humans since they will improve understanding of the complex molecular pathways involved in innate disease resistance and elucidate genetic mechanisms regulating innate disease resistance common to humans and production animals.