Trans-generational immune priming in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

Immune priming was considered an anomaly for the invertebrates till the early 21 st century, but its rise saw the uncanny evidence of its existence. With the priming phenomenon already seen in various organisms like beetles, tapeworms and Drosophila flies, we carried out one step further investigation into this endeavour to check sex-dependent trans-generational immune priming. We subjected the Drosophila melanogaster flies to the uniparental infections by turn, and checked for the enhanced immunity response in their offspring generation. This approach determined the roles of individual parents in the priming phenomenon which is seen when both the parents are infected. The unique results were the paternal immune priming which hadn’t been seen earlier, and we found sex-specific trans-generational immune priming by both maternal and paternal routes. This was established with more conviction by ruling out the selection effect in another experiment, where only the infected-dead male parents passed on the immunity trait to their sons and not the others.