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  • OUTLOOK

How plants and insects inherit immunity from their parents

Passing on short-term immunity to offspring is common in vertebrates, but plants and invertebrates take transgenerational immunity much further.
  1. Brian Owens

    1. Brian Owens is a freelance journalist in St Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada.

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An organism’s immune response to attack is usually considered to be a personal battle. A pathogen or parasite attacks, the organism mounts a defence, and one of them wins. But sometimes, the target’s relatives get involved. Many species have the ability to prepare their offspring to meet immune challenges that they themselves have faced. “Parents can somehow transfer the immunological memory of what they experienced during their lives to their offspring,” says Olivia Roth, an evolutionary ecologist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany.

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Nature 575, S55-S56 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03640-y

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Vaccines, an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content.

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