Transcriptional responses of PBMC in psychosocially stressed animals indicate an alerting of the immune system in female but not in castrated male pigs

Abstract

BackgroundBrain and immune system are linked in a bi-directional manner. To date, it remained largely unknown why immune components become suppressed, enhanced, or remain unaffected in relation to psychosocial stress. Therefore, we mixed unfamiliar pigs with different levels of aggressiveness. We separated castrated male and female pigs into psychosocially high- and low- stressed animals by skin lesions, plasma cortisol level, and creatine kinase activity obtained from agonistic behaviour associated with regrouping. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) were collected post-mortem and differential gene expression was assessed using the Affymetrix platform (n = 16).ResultsRelevant stress-dependent alterations were found only between female samples, but not between castrated male samples. Molecular routes related to TREM 1 signalling, dendritic cell maturation, IL-6 signalling, Toll-like receptor signalling, and IL-8 signalling were increased in high stressed females compared to low stressed females. This indicates a launch of immune effector molecules as a direct response. According to the shifts of transcripts encoding cell surface receptors (e.g. CD14, TLR2, TLR4, TREM1) the study highlights processes acting on pattern recognition, inflammation, and cell-cell communication.ConclusionsThe transcriptional response partly affected the degree of ‘stress responsiveness’, indicating that the high stressed females altered their signal transduction due to potential infections and injuries while fighting.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-967) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Effects of environmental enrichment and regrouping on natural autoantibodies-binding danger and neural antigens in healthy pigs with different individual characteristics

“…Coping style and indirect genetic effects Previous studies have shown that pigs diverging in coping style, that is the way they deal with stress as part of their personality, differ in immune characteristics, including NAb to KLH, and/or modulate the effects of environmental factors on immune responses (Schrama et al, 1997;Bolhuis et al, 2003;Oster et al, 2014;Reimert et al, 2014a). No effects on levels of autoantibodies binding MBP and PC were, however, found in this study.…”

Transcriptome profiling reveals stress-responsive gene networks in cattle muscles

“…This may be related to the high oxidative metabolism of the LT ( Hocquette et al, 2012b ), which makes it more prone to changes in oxidative status and therefore susceptible to stress. Muscle gene expression in response to stress likely also depends on sex ( Oster et al, 2014 ), the nature and intensity or duration of the stress, and breed, which may explain some differences in the results of our study and a previous study on Angus animals ( Zhao et al, 2012 ). Nevertheless, the regulation of genes involved in carbohydrate, lipid, and protein metabolism is likely to occur in many cases, as observed in this study, as well as in other studies on cattle ( Buckham Sporer et al, 2007 ; Zhao et al, 2012 ) and pigs ( Davoli et al, 2009 ).…”

Sex-biased transcriptomic response of the reproductive axis to stress

“…These genes include Heat shock 27kDa protein 1 ( HSPB1 ) (logFC -2.5, FDR 0.005) and Thyroid hormone receptor interactor 11 ( TRIP11 ) (logFC -1.55, FDR 0.01), both of which increase in expression in response to stress as compared to controls. TRIP11 has been previously implicated in the stress response [56], yet its function in the testes is currently unknown. The full table of differential expression results for the male testes in response to stress is available at https://git.io/vDBTw.…”