Seminar Series on Evolutionary Medicine - Jenny Tung: The importance of being social - social interactions, gene regulation,and fitness in nonhuman primates
- Date: Oct 12, 2017
- Time: 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Jenny Tung from the Duke University, USA
- For more information on the research fields of Jenny Tung, please click here: http://www.tung-lab.org/
- Location: MPI Plön
- Room: Lecture hall
- Host: Tobias Lenz and John Baines
Abstract:
In social species, interactions with other members of the same species
powerfully shape the environment that animals face each day. These
interactions mediate the evolutionary costs and benefits of group living
and, in humans, are one of the most powerful predictors of disease
susceptibility and lifespan. My lab uses nonhuman primate models to
understand the evolutionary history and mechanistic underpinnings of
social gradients in health. Using a 45-year data set from wild baboons
in Kenya, we demonstrate that social adversity in early life combines
with ecological pressures to profoundly shape individual survival and
lifetime reproductive success. In both wild baboons and captive rhesus
macaques, we also identify close ties between one dimension of social
interactions—position in a dominance rank hierarchy—and gene regulation
in the immune system. This signal is especially marked in male baboons
and female rhesus macaques, and in the latter case, we show that social
status causally alters the response to a model of bacterial infection.
However, the relationship between dominance rank and gene regulation
differs between baboons and rhesus macaques in key ways. Our results
indicate that the effects of social status are contingent on how it is
achieved and maintained, as well as its benefits for the organism. More
broadly, our findings demonstrate that close ties between social
adversity and survival have a long evolutionary history in the primate
lineage, and that changes at the level of gene regulation contribute to
this relationship.