ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2014
Multivariate immune defences and fitness in the wild: complex but ecologically important associations among plasma antibodies, health and survival.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Out of the shed and into the field: an immune toolkit for measuring wild ungulate immune phenotypes at multiple scales.Discovery immunology · 2026Article
- Population density drives increased parasitism via greater exposure and reduced resource availability in wild red deer.Parasitology · 2025Article
- The Promise of a Pointillist Perspective for Comparative Immunology.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- No correlative evidence of costs of infection or immunity on leucocyte telomere length in a wild population of Soay sheep.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Antigen specificity affects analysis of natural antibodies.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Vaccine-induced time- and age-dependent mucosal immunity to gastrointestinal parasite infection.NPJ vaccines · 2022Article
- Divergent selection for natural antibodies in poultry in the presence of a major gene.Genetics, selection, evolution : GSE · 2022Article
- Noninvasively measured immune responses reflect current parasite infections in a wild carnivore and are linked to longevity.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Embracing nature's complexity: Immunoparasitology in the wild.Seminars in immunology · 2021Review
- Applied ecoimmunology: using immunological tools to improve conservation efforts in a changing world.Conservation physiology · 2021Article
- Fitness outcomes in relation to individual variation in constitutive innate immune function.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The non-invasive measurement of faecal immunoglobulin in African equids.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2020Article
- The Evolution of Variance Control.Trends in ecology & evolution · 2020Review
- Current Understanding of Natural Antibodies and Exploring the Possibilities of Modulation Using Veterinary Models. A Review.Frontiers in immunology · 2020Review
- The genetic architecture of helminth-specific immune responses in a wild population of Soay sheep (Ovis aries).PLoS genetics · 2019Article
- Immune stability predicts tuberculosis infection risk in a wild mammal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Age affects antibody levels and anthelmintic treatment efficacy in a wild rodent.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2019Article
- A pilot study evaluating the utility of commercially available antibodies for flow cytometric analysis of Panthera species lymphocytes.BMC veterinary research · 2018Article
- Two Decades of the Impact of Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease.Integrative and comparative biology · 2018Article
- The ecology of immune state in a wild mammal, Mus musculus domesticus.PLoS biology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Despite our rapidly advancing mechanistic understanding of vertebrate immunity under controlled laboratory conditions, the links between immunity, infection and fitness under natural conditions remain poorly understood. Antibodies are central to acquired immune responses, and antibody levels circulating in vivo reflect a composite of constitutive and induced functional variants of diverse specificities (e.g. binding antigens from prevalent parasites, self tissues or novel non-self sources). Here, we measured plasma concentrations of 11 different antibody types in adult females from an unmanaged population of Soay sheep on St Kilda. Correlations among antibody measures were generally positive but weak, and eight of the measures independently predicted body mass, strongyle parasite egg count or survival over the subsequent winter. These independent and, in some cases, antagonistic relationships point to important multivariate immunological heterogeneities affecting organismal health and fitness in natural systems. Notably, we identified a strong positive association between anti-nematode immunoglobulin (Ig) G antibodies in summer and subsequent over-winter survival, providing rare evidence for a fitness benefit of helminth-specific immunity under natural conditions. Our results highlight both the evolutionary and ecological importance and the complex nature of the immune phenotype in the wild.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.