Plant & Animal Genomes XIII Conference Plant & Animal Genomes XIII ConferenceJanuary 15-19, 2005
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA
Eric Peatman , Puttharat Baoprasertkul , Chongbo He , Ping Li , Huseyin Kucuktas , Zhanjiang (John) Liu
Much effort over the last decade has been directed towards the identification and functional analysis of chemokines, a superfamily of chemotactic cytokines involved in recruitment, activation and adhesion of a variety of leukocyte types to inflammatory foci. Almost all mammalian chemokines are believed to have been found, but knowledge of their functions and importance in prominent disease pathologies continues to grow. FISH represent the largest number of extant vertebrate species and a vitally important evolutionary position, being between species depending solely on innate immunity and those depending heavily on adaptive immunity. Chemokine data from fish is crucial not only for comparative immunology, but also in efforts to understand and prevent a number of fast-acting diseases prevalent among important aquaculture species. Despite this urgency, the identification of fish chemokines has been slow, complicated by low sequence conservation and confusion over expected numbers. However, the adoption of bioinformatic approaches has allowed a rapid expansion of the repertoire of fish chemokines. The presence of a far larger than expected set of fish chemokines challenges existing views of chemokine diversity and provides an exciting, new basis for research in fish immunology. Functional analysis and expression studies on several fish chemokines in the presence of fish pathogens have already yielded important results. Harnessing genomic techniques, ongoing work in fish chemokines promises both a better understanding of fish disease resistance and new evolutionary perspectives in immunology.