Following a meal, an animal can exhibit dramatic shifts in physiology and morphology, as well as a substantial increase in metabolic rate associated with the energetic costs of processing a meal (i.e. specific dynamic action, SDA). However, little is known about the effects of digestion on another important physiological and energetically costly trait: immune function. Thus, we tested two compe...

In the past decade, significant progresses have taken place in the field of cancer immunotherapeutics, which are being developed for most human cancers. New immunotherapeutics, such as Ipilimumab (anti-CTLA-4), have been approved for clinical treatment; cell-based immunotherapies such as adoptive cell transfer (ACT) have either passed the final stage of human studies (e.g., Sipuleucel-T) for th...

The release of extracellular traps (ETs) is a recently described mechanism of innate immune response to infection. Although ETs have been intensely investigated in the context of neutrophil antimicrobial effector mechanisms, other immune cells such as mast cells, eosinophils, and macrophages can also release these structures. The different ETs have several features in common, regardless of the ...

The immune system is a complex collection of interrelated and overlapping solutions to the problem of disease. To deal with this complexity, researchers have devised multiple ways to measure immune function and to analyze the resulting data. In this way both organisms and researchers employ many tactics to solve a complex problem. One challenge facing ecological immunologists is the question of...

The relationship between nutritional status and the immune system has been a topic of study for much of the 20th century. Dramatic increases in our understanding of the organization of the immune system and the factors that regulate immune function have demonstrated a remarkable and close concordance between host nutritional status and immunity. This report traces the increasing sophistication ...

1. The risk of parasitism and infectious disease is expected to increase with population density as a consequence of positive density-dependent transmission rates. Therefore, species that encounter large fluctuations in population density are predicted to exhibit plasticity in their immune system, such that investment in costly immune defences is adjusted to match the probability of exposure to...

The study of immunity has become an important area of investigation for researchers in a wide range of areas outside the traditional discipline of immunology. For the last several decades, psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) has strived to identify key interactions among the nervous, endocrine and immune systems and behavior. More recently, the field of ecological immunology (ecoimmunology) has been es...

Vertebrate immune systems are understood to be complex and dynamic, with trade-offs among different physiological components (e.g., innate and adaptive immunity) within individuals and among taxonomic lineages. Desert tortoises (Gopherus agassizii) immunised with ovalbumin (OVA) showed a clear trade-off between levels of natural antibodies (NAbs; innate immune function) and the production of ac...

Despite the ever increasing interest in animal personalities, i.e., among-individual variation in behavior, there are still several gaps in our understanding of how experiences during ontogeny influence the expression of behavior in adulthood. Immune challenges during ontogeny have been proposed to drive feedback loops between investment in immune function and personality type. In this study we...

Initially it was believed that when ELT-2 was knocked out in nematodes this caused the nematodes to become sick from all pathogens, even ones that were not previously pathogenic. However, an experiment conducted later suggested that in older cultures of bacteria the ELT-2 knocked out nematodes do not become sick from pathogens that were previously nonpathogenic. In order to clarify the role of ...