Syrian hamsters are a valuable model for human disease, including infectious, metabolic, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer. During the COVID-19 pandemic, hamsters emerged as a valuable model for studying coronaviruses and other respiratory tract infections, as they exhibit disease progression and immune responses similar to those of humans. However, a lack of genomic resources has limited immunological research within this model.
Identifying Reference Sets
To address this, Nicole Adams, a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics, and Tammy S. Tollison, a PhD student in Comparative Biomedical Sciences, both in the lab of Xinxia Peng, PhD at North Carolina State University, created the first validated reference set of immunoglobulin (IG) and T-cell receptor (TR) constant region sequences in the Syrian hamster, which can be found in their recent publication in The Journal of Immunology.
“We now have the tools to investigate how IG/TR repertoires respond to diverse immune stimuli and to better understand repertoire diversity and usage, which increases the utility of Syrian hamsters as a translational model for human disease,” shared Adams.
To develop IG and TR reference resources, Adams and Tollison developed a gene-targeted assay using long-read transcriptome sequencing and sequenced samples from six tissue types. This resulted in over 43,000 full-length IG/TR transcripts that were used to construct a reference set of 22 IG/TR constant (C) regions. They then designed and validated a set of species-specific primers that target IG/TR C regions for immune repertoire profiling. The C region reference framework and primer sets recovered both membrane-bound and secreted immunoglobulin.
Expanding the use of Syrian Hamster Models
“These new tools will allow researchers to more accurately characterize adaptive immune responses in hamsters and enhance future studies as researchers can now reliably profile hamster IG/TR sequences, and monitor B and T cell responses to infection and vaccination,” shared Tollison.
Collectively, the work expands the immunogenetic toolkit for Syrian hamsters and boosts their translational relevance as a model in infectious disease research. Researchers in the Peng lab plan to expand their work by characterizing germline V(D)J genes and expanding sampling across tissues, disease states, and experimental conditions to better capture the full diversity and usage of IG/TR repertoires. The researchers also plan to build on these gene-targeted assays by incorporating more quantitative approaches, including qPCR, RNA-seq, and single-cell immune repertoire sequencing, allowing for more detailed analysis of receptor diversity and function.
