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Insects don’t make the cells and antibodies characteristic of the vertebrate adaptive immune response. As a result, scientists assumed for years that insects rely on innate immune defenses that are neither heritable nor directed at any pathogen in particular. Over the last 20 years, though, evidence has emerged that invertebrates do inherit some types of immunity from their parents, but it’s still not clear how or how often it happens. In a study published December 15 in Cell Reports, researchers show that fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) and mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti) pass immunity to viruses to their progeny for multiple generations.
“The authors present a very thorough set of experiments that detail the existence of this transfer of some kind of immunological memory to the offspring from generation to generation,” says Barbara Milutinović, a postdoc at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria who did not participate ...
