Diet and immunity are both highly complex processes through which organisms interact with their environment and adapt to variable conditions. Parents that are able to transmit information to their offspring about prevailing environmental conditions have a selective advantage by ‘priming’ the physiology of their offspring. We used a meta‐analytic approach to test the effect of parental diet on offspring immune responses. Using the geometric framework for nutrition (a method for analysing diet compositions wherein food nutrient components are expressed as axes in a Cartesian coordinate space) to define dietary manipulations in terms of their energy and macronutrient compositions, we compiled the results of 226 experiments from 38 published papers on the intergenerational effects of diet on immunity, across a range of study species and immunological responses. We observed intergenerational impacts of parental nutrition on a number of offspring immunological processes, including expression of pro‐inflammatory biomarkers as well as decreases in anti‐inflammatory markers in response to certain parental diets. For example, across our data set as a whole (encompassing several types of dietary manipulation), dietary stress in parents was seen to significantly increase pro‐inflammatory cytokine levels measured in offspring (overall d = 0.575). All studies included in our analysis were from experiments in which the offspring were raised on a normal or control diet, so our findings suggest that a nutrition‐dependent immune state can be inherited, and that this immune state is maintained in the short term, despite offspring returning to an ‘optimal’ diet. We demonstrate how the geometric framework for nutrition can be used to disentangle the role that different forms of dietary manipulation can have on intergenerational immunity. For example, offspring B‐cell responses were significantly decreased when parents were raised on a range of different diets. Similarly, our approach allowed us to show that a parental diet elevated in protein (regardless of energy composition and relative to a control diet) can increase expression of inflammatory markers while decreasing B‐cell‐associated markers. By conducting a systematic review of the literature, we have identified important gaps that impair our understanding of the intergenerational effects of diet, such as a paucity of experimental studies involving increased protein and decreased energy, and a lack of studies directed at the whole‐organism consequences of these processes, such as immune resilience to infection. The results of our analyses inform our understanding of the effects of diet on physiological state across diverse biological fields, including biomedical sciences, maintenance of agricultural breed stock and conservation breeding programs, among others.

中文翻译：

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营养对免疫的代际影响：系统评价和荟萃分析

饮食和免疫都是高度复杂的过程，生物体通过这些过程与环境相互作用并适应可变条件。能够将有关主要环境条件的信息传递给后代的父母通过“启动”后代的生理机能具有选择性优势。我们使用元分析方法来测试父母饮食对后代免疫反应的影响。使用营养的几何框架（一种分析饮食成分的方法，其中食物营养成分在笛卡尔坐标空间中表示为轴）根据能量和常量营养素成分来定义饮食操作，我们汇编了 38 个已发表的 226 个实验的结果关于饮食对免疫的代际影响的论文，跨越一系列研究物种和免疫反应。我们观察到父母营养对许多后代免疫过程的代际影响，包括促炎生物标志物的表达以及响应某些父母饮食的抗炎标志物的减少。例如，在我们的整个数据集（包括几种类型的饮食操作）中，父母的饮食压力被认为显着增加了后代测量的促炎细胞因子水平（总体 d = 0.575）。我们分析中包括的所有研究都来自以正常或对照饮食饲养后代的实验，因此我们的研究结果表明，营养依赖性免疫状态可以遗传，并且这种免疫状态会在短期内保持，尽管后代恢复了“最佳”饮食。我们展示了如何使用营养的几何框架来解开不同形式的饮食操纵对代际免疫的作用。例如，当父母在一系列不同的饮食中长大时，后代的 B 细胞反应显着降低。同样，我们的方法使我们能够证明蛋白质含量升高的父母饮食（无论能量组成和相对于对照饮食）可以增加炎症标志物的表达，同时减少 B 细胞相关标志物。通过对文献进行系统审查，我们发现了影响我们对饮食代际影响理解的重要差距，例如缺乏涉及增加蛋白质和减少能量的实验研究，并且缺乏针对这些过程的整个生物体后果的研究，例如对感染的免疫恢复能力。我们的分析结果让我们了解饮食对不同生物领域生理状态的影响，包括生物医学科学、农业品种种群的维护和保护育种计划等。