CAREER: The role of maternal behavior in driving bidirectional interactions between infectious diseases and offspring immune phenotype.

University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR

Investigators

Abstract

Children inherit DNA from their parents, and this shapes innumerable traits, like hair color, height, and their likelihood of developing chronic illnesses. In addition to these genomic contributions, parents also shape their offspring through their behavior and physiology, which are referred to as parental effects. For instance, exposure to infectious diseases can cause mothers to pass antibodies to their young that protect them from pathogens. Much less understood is how infectious diseases shape offspring responses to pathogens through changes in parental behavior, yet parental behavior is a key determinant of their offspring’s developmental environment. Birds represent an excellent study organism for understanding the effects of disease on offspring disease outcomes that are mediated through shifts in parental behavior, because the physiology of the parent and offspring become separated after egg-laying. Once eggs are laid, parental incubation behavior shapes a vital element of the avian embryonic developmental environment: temperature. Birds are also important study organisms because they harbor pathogens relevant to wildlife, agriculture, and humans. The investigator will study the effects of disease on avian parental care behaviors and subsequent offspring responses to disease, including likelihood of disease transmission. Using these data, the investigator’s lab will develop theoretical models to explore the contributions of parental effects to epidemic size and duration, and pathogen virulence. In addition, proposed educational efforts will help to retain underrepresented groups in STEM academia by providing professional development and research opportunities in partnership with the Association for Women in Science and a regional Historically Black University. This project crosses scales and disciplines to explore an important question in disease ecology: how important is non-genomic inheritance to host-pathogen dynamics? The parental effects examined herein occur at different stages of early development, which will reveal how parental effects mediated through shifts in parental behavior vs. parental physiology (e.g., maternal antibodies) interact to shape offspring immune phenotypes, and increase our understanding of the plasticity of immune phenotypes to variable pre- and postnatal environments. The researchers will use an avian model system to test the overarching hypothesis that the pathogen environment shapes parental care behaviors and reproductive investment creating variation in the developmental environment to affect offspring disease outcomes important to population-level disease dynamics and pathogen evolution. Birds are an excellent model system to explore these questions because there is a clear link between avian parental behavior, the developmental environment (e.g., incubation temperature), and offspring immune phenotype. Empirical data will be used to develop theoretical models examining complex cross-scale interactions that result in dynamic feedbacks to shape host reproduction, host phenotype (disease outcomes and transmission likelihood), pathogen phenotype (growth and reproduction), and ultimately, epidemic dynamics. This research also will build our understanding of the importance of the early thermal environment to offspring disease susceptibility. This award was co-funded by the Integrative Ecological Physiology and the Symbiosis, Defense and Self-recognition programs in the Physiological and Structural Systems cluster and the Behavioral Systems cluster within the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.