Transcriptional responses of PBMC in psychosocially stressed animals indicate an alerting of the immune system in female but not in castrated male pigs.
BMC Genomics. 2014-01-01; 15(1): 967
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-15-967
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1. BMC Genomics. 2014 Nov 8;15:967. doi: 10.1186/1471-2164-15-967.
Transcriptional responses of PBMC in psychosocially stressed animals indicate an
alerting of the immune system in female but not in castrated male pigs.
Oster M, Muráni E, Ponsuksili S, D’Eath RB, Turner SP, Evans G, Thölking L, Kurt
E, Klont R, Foury A, Mormède P, Wimmers K(1).
Author information:
(1)Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), Institute for Genome Biology,
Wilhelm-Stahl-Allee 2, 18196 Dummerstorf, Germany. .
BACKGROUND: Brain and immune system are linked in a bi-directional manner. To
date, it remained largely unknown why immune components become suppressed,
enhanced, or remain unaffected in relation to psychosocial stress. Therefore, we
mixed unfamiliar pigs with different levels of aggressiveness. We separated
castrated male and female pigs into psychosocially high- and low- stressed
animals by skin lesions, plasma cortisol level, and creatine kinase activity
obtained from agonistic behaviour associated with regrouping. Peripheral blood
mononuclear cells (PBMC) were collected post-mortem and differential gene
expression was assessed using the Affymetrix platform (n = 16).
RESULTS: Relevant stress-dependent alterations were found only between female
samples, but not between castrated male samples. Molecular routes related to TREM
1 signalling, dendritic cell maturation, IL-6 signalling, Toll-like receptor
signalling, and IL-8 signalling were increased in high stressed females compared
to low stressed females. This indicates a launch of immune effector molecules as
a direct response. According to the shifts of transcripts encoding cell surface
receptors (e.g. CD14, TLR2, TLR4, TREM1) the study highlights processes acting on
pattern recognition, inflammation, and cell-cell communication.
CONCLUSIONS: The transcriptional response partly affected the degree of ‘stress
responsiveness’, indicating that the high stressed females altered their signal
transduction due to potential infections and injuries while fighting.
DOI: 10.1186/1471-2164-15-967
PMCID: PMC4233077
PMID: 25380980 [Indexed for MEDLINE]