Role of avian dendritic cells

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The UK poultry industry faces many challenges to remain sustainable, including moves to more extensive rearing systems; withdrawal of antibiotics and other drugs such as anti-coccidials; resistance and residue problems with anti-helminthics. These will all impact on poultry health, but also the potential to impact on human health. Increased incidence of zoonotic pathogens in chickens, such as avian influenza, could lead to an increase in these diseases in man. One approach to these challenges is to develop novel and more effective vaccines. For this to be a realistic and sustainable approach, we need a better understanding of host-pathogen interactions in chickens. This proposal seeks to build on our unique capability to grow dendritic cells (DC) in a non-mammalian species. DC in mammals are professional antigen presenting cells, providing a link between innate and adaptive immune responses, driving the adaptive response to that necessary to clear infection with a particular pathogen. In mammals, antigen presentation takes place primarily in lymph nodes (LN). The chicken, like most non-mammalian vertebrates, lacks LN but antigen presentation still occurs. This proposal forms part of our efforts to understand antigen presentation in a species lacking LN. This proposal aims to understand DC biology in the chicken in more depth. Firstly, we wish to define the phenotype of DC, both immature DC and those matured in vitro under different conditions, in more depth. In mammals and presumably in the chicken, DC travel to the site of infection, and thence to the site of antigen presentation, under the influence of chemokines. We intend to determine which chemokines have functional effects on chicken DC. Preliminary data suggests that DC can be matured to either a Th1 or TH2 phenotype. We will determine if DC can bias T cells to a Th1 or Th2 phenotype in vitro. We then want to characterise ex vivo-isolated DC, and finally begin to analyse chicken DC migration in vivo.

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