Conservation of cell-intrinsic immune responses in diverse nonhuman primate species

Abstract

Differences in immune responses across species can contribute to the varying permissivity of species to the same viral pathogen. Understanding how our closest evolutionary relatives, nonhuman primates (NHPs), confront pathogens and how these responses have evolved over time could shed light on host range barriers, especially for zoonotic infections. Here, we analyzed cell-intrinsic immunity of primary cells from the broadest panel of NHP species interrogated to date, including humans, great apes, and Old and New World monkeys. Our analysis of their transcriptomes after poly(I:C) transfection revealed conservation in the functional consequences of their response. In mapping reads to either the human or the species-specific genomes, we observed that with the current state of NHP annotations, the percent of reads assigned to a genetic feature was largely similar regardless of the method. Together, these data provide a baseline for the cell-intrinsic responses elicited by a potent immune stimulus across multiple NHP donors, including endangered species, and serve as a resource for refining and furthering the existing annotations of NHP genomes.