Mild thermal stress does not negatively affect immune gene expression in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris
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Original article
Mild thermal stress does not negatively affect immune gene expression in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris Nuria BLASCO-LAVILLA , Andrés GARCÍA-REINA , Pilar DE LA RÚA Department of Zoology and Physical Anthropology, Faculty of Veterinary, University of Murcia, 30100, Murcia, Spain Received 11 February 2020 – Revised 2 July 2020 – Accepted 19 August 2020
Abstract – Body temperature changes can modify an insect’s ability to fight infections by altering its immune activity. This work evaluated the impact of mild cold and heat thermal stress on the expression of different immune and heat shock genes in the species Bombus terrestris . Additionally, a thermal treatment was repeated under starvation to analyze a possible compromise of immune gene expression in favor of a thermal stress response when energetic resources are limited. Results pointed to a role of Hsc70 and Aha1 genes in tolerance to moderately high temperatures. Expression of the immune genes was not negatively affected by the cold or the heat treatments, and the receptor gene BGRP1 was upregulated with cold, possibly indicating an increase in the cellular immune activity. Under starvation, the effect of the heat and the cold treatments caused a higher upregulation in all genes analyzed, suggesting a synergistic effect of starvation and thermal stress on the activation of heat shock and immune gene expression. bumblebee / temperature variation / heat shock genes / immunity / RT-qPCR
1. INTRODUCTION Insects are ectothermic organisms whose basic physiological functions such as locomotion, growth, and reproduction are strongly influenced by environmental temperature (Huey and Stevenson 1979). Changes in body temperature can affect the performance of insects, altering their capacity to fight infections (Thomas and Blanford 2003). It has been proposed that temperature can directly modify the immune response in different ways: altering thermosensitive cellular and enzymatic processes that drive immune activity (Somero 1995; Le Morvan et al. 1998), eliciting Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13592-020-00806-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Corresponding author: N. Blasco-Lavilla, [email protected] Manuscript editor: Marina Meixner
the activation of pathways and mechanisms that are shared between thermal and immune stresses (Sinclair et al. 2013), or compromising the immune response as a trade-off with the thermal response (Ferguson et al. 2018). Interaction between the immune and the thermal stress pathways (cross-talk) and activation of shared mechanisms (cross-tolerance) can confer an adaptive advantage if both stressors are encountered in nature simultaneously, e.g., an insect facing a pathogen and a cold temperature at the same time. Nonetheless, if the mechanisms activated by these two pathways are different and have a high energetic cost associated, protection against one of the stressors could be compromised with negative consequences
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