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The immune system of jawless vertebrates: insights into the prototype of the adaptive immune system

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Abstract

Jawless vertebrates diverged from an ancestor of jawed vertebrates approximately 550 million years ago. They mount adaptive immune responses to repetitive antigenic challenges, despite lacking major histocompatibility complex molecules, immunoglobulins, T cell receptors, and recombination-activating genes. Instead of B cell and T cell receptors, agnathan lymphocytes express unique antigen receptors named variable lymphocyte receptors (VLRs), which generate diversity through a gene conversion-like mechanism. Although gnathostome antigen receptors and VLRs are structurally unrelated, jawed and jawless vertebrates share essential features of lymphocyte-based adaptive immunity, including the expression of a single type of receptor on each lymphocyte, clonal expansion of antigen-stimulated lymphocytes, and the dichotomy of cellular and humoral immunity, indicating that the backbone of the adaptive immune system was established in a common ancestor of all vertebrates. Furthermore, recent evidence indicates that, unlike previously thought, agnathans have a unique classical pathway of complement activation where VLRB molecules act as antibodies instead of immunoglobulins. It seems likely that the last common ancestor of all vertebrates had an adaptive immune system resembling that of jawless vertebrates, suggesting that, as opposed to jawed vertebrates, agnathans have retained the prototype of vertebrate adaptive immunity.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

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This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT).

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  1. Division of Biomedical Information Analysis, Iwate Tohoku Medical Megabank Organization, Iwate Medical University, Iwate, 028-3694, Japan

    Yoichi Sutoh

  2. Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine and Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, 060-8638, Japan

    Masanori Kasahara

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Sutoh, Y., Kasahara, M. The immune system of jawless vertebrates: insights into the prototype of the adaptive immune system. Immunogenetics 73, 5–16 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00251-020-01182-6

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