Pathogen‐mediated selection favours the maintenance of innate immunity gene polymorphism in a widespread wild ungulate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toll-like receptors (TLR) play a central role in recognition and host frontline defence against a wide range of pathogens. A number of recent studies have shown that TLR genes (Tlrs) often exhibit large polymorphism in natural populations. Yet, there is little knowledge on how this polymorphism is maintained and how it influences disease susceptibility in the wild. In previous work, we showed that some Tlrs exhibit similarly high levels of genetic diversity as genes of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), and signatures of contemporary balancing selection in roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), the most abundant cervid species in Europe. Here, we investigated the evolutionary mechanisms by which pathogen-mediated selection could shape this innate immunity genetic diversity by examining the relationships between Tlr (Tlr2, Tlr4 and Tlr5) genotypes (heterozygosity status and presence of specific alleles) and infections with Toxoplasma and Chlamydia, two widespread intracellular pathogens known to cause reproductive failure in ungulates. We showed that Toxoplasma and Chlamydia exposures vary significantly across years and landscape features with few co-infection events detected and that the two pathogens exert antagonistic selection on Tlr2 polymorphism. By contrast, we found limited support for Tlr heterozygote advantage. Our study confirmed the importance of looking beyond Mhc genes in wildlife immunogenetic studies. It also emphasized the necessity to consider multiple pathogen challenges and their spatiotemporal variation to improve our understanding of vertebrate defence evolution against pathogens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".