{"doi":"10.1101/2020.08.13.250274","title":"Maternal <i>schistosomiasis</i> impairs offspring IL-4 production and B cell expansion","abstract":"Summary Maternal helminth infections are a global public health concern and correlate with altered infant immune responses to some childhood immunizations, but a mechanistic understanding of how maternal helminth infection alters the cellular immune responses of offspring is lacking. Here we establish a model of maternal Schistosoma mansoni infection in dual IL-4 reporter mice. We find that offspring born to mothers infected with S. mansoni have impaired production of IL-4 during homoeostasis, and following immunization with a Tetanus-Diphtheria vaccine. We identified that iNKT cells are the dominant source of IL-4 during early life homeostasis, and that diminished IL-4 production was associated with both reduced B cell and follicular dendritic cell responses. These defects were maintained long-term, affecting memory B and T cell responses. Single-cell RNASeq analysis of immunized offspring identified egg antigen-dependent reductions in B-cell cell cycle and proliferation-related genes. These data reveal that maternal infection leads to long-lasting defects in the cellular responses to heterologous antigens and provide vital insight into the influence of maternal infection on offspring immunity.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":130721,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9557,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":583500,"name":"Lisa Gibbs","orcid":"0000-0002-4567-6659","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":583501,"name":"Andrew Ready","orcid":"0000-0002-6885-602X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":289851,"name":"H. Atakan Ekiz","orcid":"0000-0001-7718-6841","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":411823,"name":"Bartek Rajwa","orcid":"0000-0001-7540-8236","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":297342,"name":"Keke C. Fairfax","orcid":"0000-0002-8382-2960","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":583499,"name":"Diana Cortés‐Selva","orcid":"0000-0001-9203-2090","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":51,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:56.698770Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}