A Lesser Diversity of Circulating Antibodies in the Aging Killifish Immune System
Short-lived killifish are one of the more recently adopted animal models of aging. All such models are a trade-off between the cost of running studies and the relevance of their biochemistry to long-lived mammals such as our own species. Fortunately, a lot of the cellular biochemistry of aging is similar enough to make such models useful; unfortunately the differences are often significant enough to sink specific attempts to discover mechanisms and build new therapies. Here, researchers look at the aging immune system in killifish, finding a feature known to exist in humans, and further digging in to the details.
Aging individuals exhibit a pervasive decline in adaptive immune function, with important implications for health and lifespan. Previous studies have found a pervasive loss of immune repertoire diversity in human peripheral blood during aging; however, little is known about repertoire aging in other immune compartments, or in species other than humans. Here, we perform the first study of immune repertoire aging in an emerging model of vertebrate aging, the African turquoise killifish (Nothobranchius furzeri). Despite their extremely short lifespans, these killifish exhibit complex and individualized heavy-chain repertoires, with a generative process capable of producing millions of distinct productive sequences.
Whole-body killifish repertoires decline rapidly in within-individual diversity with age, while between-individual variability increases. Large, expanded B-cell clones exhibit far greater diversity loss with age than small clones, suggesting important differences in how age affects different B-cell populations. The immune repertoires of isolated intestinal samples exhibit especially dramatic age-related diversity loss, related to an elevated prevalence of expanded clones. Lower intestinal repertoire diversity was also associated with transcriptomic signatures of reduced B-cell activity, supporting a functional role for diversity changes in killifish immunosenescence. Our results highlight important differences in systemic vs. organ-specific aging dynamics in the adaptive immune system.