In many animals, including humans, males and females respond differently to infection and disease. Why do they do so? Do they have different immunity? How do they evolve such responses? We try to find answers to these most fundamental questions about animal immunity in our recently accepted work in BMC Biology.
Using seed beetles as a model animal (quite famous for their violent sexual habit; Google traumatic insemination), we show that increasing (sexual) conflicts between males and females during sex possibly laid the foundation of such evolved infection responses and immune system (We actually tracked such evolution as it happens; painful but worked out nicely).
A highly motivated set of experiments by Basabi Bagchi and Devshuvam Banerji from the lab, just days before the nationwide lockdown started last year. Great teamwork led by David Berger (Uppsala University); Fascinating set of data generated by Elina Immonen, Göran Arnqvist, Irene Söderhäll and several others
Read the paper here
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12915-021-01049-6/figures/4
Welcome to Evolutionary Immunology Lab at Ashoka University 