Reinke, Aaron, Claycomb, Julie, Zhao, Winnie, Wadi, Lina, Willis, Alexandra, Tamim El Jarkass, Hala, Sukhdeo, Ronesh
[
International Worm Meeting,
2021]
Inherited immunity is an emerging field with important consequences for our understanding of health and evolution. Inherited immunity describes how infected parents can transfer immunity to offspring, promoting progeny survival in the face of infection. Critically, the mechanisms underlying inherited immunity are mostly unknown. Microsporidia are intracellular parasites that infect almost all animals, including humans; Nematocida parisii is a natural microsporidian pathogen of C. elegans. Here, we show that N. parisii-infected worms produce offspring that are resistant to microsporidia infection. We find that immunity is induced in a dose dependent manner and lasts for a single generation. Intergenerational immunity prevents host cell invasion by N. parisii and also enhances survival to the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Further, we show that inherited immunity is triggered by the parental transcriptional response to infection, which can also be induced through maternal somatic depletion of negative regulators PALS-22 and the retinoblastoma protein ortholog LIN-35. We show that other biotic and abiotic stresses, such as viral infection and cadmium exposure, that induce a similar transcriptional response to microsporidia can also induce immunity in progeny. Our results demonstrate that distinct stimuli can induce inherited immunity to provide resistance against multiple classes of pathogens. These results show that activation of an innate immune response can provide protection against pathogens not only within a generation, but also in the next generation.