Meeting Abstract
Aspects of animal life history can constrain immune function, and biases in components of the immune response are often tightly coupled to variation in individual life history. Structural regeneration of external tissues, whereby organisms completely restore damaged tissue in lieu of repair and scarring, is an extremely rare life-history trait in mammals. One hypothesis put forward to explain the rarity of tissue regeneration in mammals is that there are inherent trade-offs between mammalian immunity and tissue regeneration, but this idea has yet to be rigorously tested because of the lack of a suitable model system. Taking advantage of a unique study system, the African spiny mouse (Acomys spp.), for which genuine tissue regeneration was recently described in wild, pathogen-exposed, immunocompetent adults, we tested the hypothesis that regeneration imposes constraints on immune function. We used a comparative immunological approach to examine variation in cellular and humoral components of the innate immune response in regeneration-competent spiny mice and regeneration-incompetent laboratory and wild mice. Our results suggest that subtle differences in spiny mouse immunity may facilitate the maintenance of the regeneration phenotype.
