ABSTRACT
Animals in the non-tropical zone usually demonstrate seasonal variations in immune function, which is important for their survival. In the present study, seasonal changes in immunity in striped hamsters (Cricetulus barabensis) were investigated to test the winter immunoenhancement hypothesis. Male hamsters were captured from the wild in the fall and winter of 2014 and in the spring and summer of 2015. Body mass, body fat mass and blood glucose levels of the hamsters were all highest in the summer, whereas relative fatness and thymus mass had no seasonal changes. Spleen mass was highest in the fall and white blood cells and phytohaemagglutinin (PHA) response indicative of cellular immunity were lowest in the summer among the four seasons, which supports the winter immunoenhancement hypothesis. IgG and IgM titers were lowest in the fall, which was against this hypothesis. Body fat mass had no correlations with cellular and humoral immunity, suggesting it was not the reason for seasonal changes in cellular and humoral immunity in males. Leptin titers were higher in spring and summer than in fall and winter. No correlation between leptin and cellular and humoral immunity suggested that leptin did not mediate their seasonal changes. Similarly, corticosterone levels were also higher in spring and summer than in fall and winter, which correlated negatively with cellular immunity but positively with IgG levels. This result implied that corticosterone has a suppressive effect on cellular immunity and an enhancing effect on humoral immunity. In summary, distinct components of immune systems exhibited different seasonal patterns.
This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.
Footnotes
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing or financial interests.
Author contributions
Conceptualization: D.-L.X.; Methodology: D.-L.X., X.-K.H.; Formal analysis: D.-L.X.; Investigation: X.-K.H.; Resources: Y.T.; Writing - original draft: Y.T.; Writing - review & editing: D.-L.X.; Supervision: D.-L.X.; Project administration: D.-L.X.; Funding acquisition: D.-L.X.
Funding
The present study was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31370444; 31370427) and the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2013CM019).
Supplementary information
Supplementary information available online at http://bio.biologists.org/lookup/doi/10.1242/bio.038489.supplemental
- Received September 11, 2018.
- Accepted October 15, 2018.
- © 2018. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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