video courtesy of Carl Facer
In research supported by the National Science Foundation, Tom Gilmore’s lab recently published three papers that address the origins of immunity, as well as its possible role in disease in threatened marine invertebrates. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, PhD student Joe Brennan led a study that characterized a conserved pathogen response molecule, a Toll-like receptor, in a sea anemone model. In a paper in Scientific Reports led by PhD student Kate Mansfield, and with collaborators from the labs of Trevor Siggers and John Finnerty (at BU) and Virginia Weis (Oregon State University), they investigated the role of immune transcription factor NF-κB in loss of symbiosis in an anemone model for coral bleaching. Finally, NSF graduate fellow Leah Williams, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Texas Arlington, showed that an endangered Caribbean coral, Orbicella faveolata, encodes a complete Toll-like receptor to NF-κB immune pathway with extensive similarity to human immune pathways. This last paper was published in Developmental and Comparative Immunology, and included 40 undergraduate co-authors from BB522, a molecular biology project laboratory in which early studies for this research were carried out.