Transgenerational Developmental Effects of Immune Priming in the Red Flour Beetle .

Immune priming, the increased chance to survive a secondary encounter with a pathogen, has been described for many invertebrate species, which lack the classical adaptive immune system of vertebrates. Priming can be specific even for closely related bacterial strains, last up to the entire lifespan of an individual, and in some species, it can also be transferred to the offspring and is then called transgenerational immune priming (TGIP). In the red flour beetle , a pest of stored grains, TGIP has even been shown to be transferred paternally after injection of adult beetles with heat-killed .

Specificity of oral immune priming in the red flour beetle .

Immune specificity is the degree to which a host's immune system discriminates among various pathogens or antigenic variants. Vertebrate immune memory is highly specific due to antibody responses. On the other hand, some invertebrates show immune priming, i.