Project description:Attenuated whole organism vaccines targeting the malaria liver stage reliably confer sterile immunity. These vaccines can completely protect female mice from infection, but protection in male mice remains unproven. We discovered that male BALB/cJ mice vaccinated with prime-and-trap, a whole organism-based vaccine strategy, exhibit poorer protection against Plasmodium yoelii sporozoite challenge than females. We investigated this sex difference, and identified vaccinated males have fewer hepatic memory CD8+ T cells than females when scaling for differences in liver biomass, and reduced acute inflammatory responses post-vaccination. Surgical hormone manipulation clarified that the presence of testicular hormones, not the absence of ovarian hormones, hindered protection in male mice. The presence of androgens did not affect memory CD8+ T cells quantity nor quality of, but inhibited protective cellular responses during sporozoite challenge. Thus, both males and females form functional memory responses following prime-and-trap vaccination, but androgens during sporozoite challenge impair protection in male mice.
Project description:Small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs) have been proposed as potential vectors of the interface between genes and environment. Here, we report that environmental conditions involving traumatic stress in early life, alter miRNA and piRNA composition in sperm of adult males in mice.
Project description:Malaria gametocytes, the precursors of gametes, is the stage essential for malaria transmission to the mosquito vector. In the circulation they arise from asexual erythrocytic stages and then develop into mature females and males. Identification of sex-specific transcription factors is a key to understand biology of this stage. However, despite of intensive studies, none of them have been identified yet. In this paper we report an AP2 family transcription factor AP2-FG is responsible for female-specific gene expression.
Project description:The goal of this phase 1/2a sporozoite challenge trial (NCT01883609) was to evaluate novel malaria vaccination regimens of the GSK pre-erythrocytic RTS,S/AS01B vaccine alone and concomitantly same-site administered with the viral vectors ChAd63 & MVA encoding the liver stage antigen construct ME-TRAP. Four vaccine groups were studied and received three vaccinations at a monthly interval. All subjects then underwent controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) 11 weeks after first vaccine administration.