Evolution of developmental and comparative immunology in poultry: the regulators and the regulated

Authors: LU, MINGMIN - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA); LEE, YOUNGSUB - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA); Lillehoj, Hyun

Submitted to: Developmental and Comparative Immunology
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 8/28/2022
Publication Date: 9/2/2022
Citation: Lu, M., Lee, Y., Lillehoj, H.S. 2022. Evolution of developmental and comparative immunology in poultry: the regulators and the regulated. Developmental and Comparative Immunology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dci.2022.104525.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dci.2022.104525

Interpretive Summary: Over the last few decades, there has been slow but significant progress in the understanding of chicken immune system compared with other avian species, mainly owing to its economic importance and the availability of its genome sequence. Despite recent progress in the identification and development of immune reagents to detect avian lymphocyte and cytokine markers during the last couple of decades, limited information on poultry immune system and its function hinders the development of effective prevention and treatment strategies against poultry diseases. Chicken immune system is very complex and has a highly integrated host defense system that is similar to other animal species. In this review, ARS scientists discuss our current understanding of chicken immune system and its function in disease process. Furthermore, the authors discuss many advantages of using avian embryo model as an experimental system to conduct developmental and comparative immunological studies of thymus and bursa lymphocytes. Moreover, with the availability of multiple established chicken cell lines and many genetic lines of chickens, poultry is still a good experimental animal model for disease research. This review will provide new information on poultry immunity that will facilitate the development of novel therapeutic strategies against many infectious diseases in poultry.

Technical Abstract: Over the last few decades, there has been slow but significant progress in the understanding of chicken immune system compared with other avian species, mainly owing to its economic importance and the availability of its genome sequence. Recent reports on the annotated turkey and duck genome sequence provide a framework for advancing the identification and discovery of novel immune-related genes. Along with the increasing number of avian genome sequences, the advanced data mining technologies, which can identify genes with highly GC-rich sequences, absent from genetic databases and genome assemblies, have represented a variety of “missing” genes in the avian genome. Despite recent progress in the identification and development of immune reagents to detect avian lymphocyte and cytokine markers during the last couple of decades, numerous key questions regarding lymphocyte function and avian cell-mediated immunity remain to be addressed, especially with the availability of additional immune tools. Facilitating the discovery of novel genes and determination of their functions in chickens would open new avenues to promote our understanding of the regulatory mechanisms of avian system in both diseased and normal states. This will provide new therapeutic strategies for controlling avian diseases and promoting avian production. In summary, we provided an update on the study of regulatory and regulated components of poultry immunity in this review, which may help to highlight the importance of further studies in avian immunology.