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Of mice, men and immunity: a case for evolutionary systems biology

Nature Immunology volume 19, pages 421–425 (2018)Cite this article

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Animal models have been tremendously useful to translational research, but there is a need to maximize their predictive value to human disease. This Comment proposes novel strategies that consider evolutionary history and the presence, absence or modification of molecular networks in one species that are being studied in the other.

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Fig. 1: Evolutionary systems biology.
Fig. 2: Evolutionary network modeling.
Fig. 3: Experimental and analytical factors affect the appearance of observed networks.

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Acknowledgements

We thank I. Pessah, M. Nicotra, T. Benos and E. Gomez for suggestions, and the reviewers for the comments (whose wording was, in some cases, included). Supported by the US National Institutes of Health (GM 108865 for A.R.C.; and AI AI079145 for P.B.E.), The Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, Takeda California and the Chiba University-UC San Diego Program in Mucosal Immunology, Allergy and Vaccines. P.B.E. holds a joint appointment in the Department of Immunology, Chiba University, Chiba, Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Veterinary Sciences and Comparative Medicine, Department of Pathology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Peter B. Ernst

  2. Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, School of Veterinary Medicine, University of California Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Peter B. Ernst

  3. Department of Computational and Systems Biology, Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis

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Correspondence to Peter B. Ernst or Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis.

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Ernst, P.B., Carvunis, AR. Of mice, men and immunity: a case for evolutionary systems biology. Nat Immunol 19, 421–425 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-018-0084-4

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