Amphioxus Immunity

Professor, College of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University; President, Beijing University of Chinese MedicineAnlong Xu was awarded a government scholarship to study in the United States after his B.S. degree from Sun Yat-sen University in 1985. He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Sep 1986 to pursue his graduate study in immunogenetics under Dr. Harris Lewin’s supervision and obtained his Ph.D. from UIUC in 1992. Dr. Xu then did his postdoctoral research in Dr. Helen M. Ranney’s lab at the University of California, San Diego for 2 years. Dr. Xu joined a San Diego-based Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp from 1994-1996 and worked on new drug discovery. After 10 years of study and research work in the U.S., he joined the faculty of Department of Biochemistry at College of Life Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, his alma mater, in 1996.Dr. Xu currently is a professor in molecular biology and immunology, Director of National Engineering Center for Marine Biotechnology of South China Sea. Dr. Xu was appointed to Vice-President for research and development of Sun Yat-sen University in 2008 after serving as Dean of the College of Life Sciences for 9 years. He was promoted as President of Beijing University of Chinese Medicine in 2013. Dr. Xu has published more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, such as N. Engl J Med, Sci Signal, Genome Res, Am J Hum Genet, and J Immunol. Dr. Xu is currently President of Guangdong Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Vice-President of International Society for Developmental and Comparative Immunology. He currently serves on the Editorial Board for the following international journals: Annual Review of Animal Bioscience, BMC Genomics, and Animal Biotechnology.At the end of last century, Dr. Xu started his study on the origin and evolution of human immunity using Amphioxus as a model organism. His lab is now one of the pioneer labs in the world to study amphioxus immunity, although this species had been an iconic model for the evolutionary biology for more than 200 years. Instead of using conventional immunological methods only, his lab combined traditional immune methods with cellular, biochemical and molecular approaches, particularly genomic approach, to conduct a comprehensive survey on the immune response of amphioxus to bacterial infection, which gave us a quick open-up for this brand new field. For last 15 years, his lab has contributed more than 40 papers related to amphioxus immunity, which made a great contribution to the knowledge of amphioxus immunity and the understanding of origin and evolution of vertebrate’s immunity, especially human immunity.

• 1 Amphioxus is a model for understanding the evolution of vertebrate2 Basic knowledge of immunology 3 Immune organs and cells of amphioxus4 Genomic and transcriptomic view of the amphioxus immunity  5 Pattern recognition system in amphioxus 6 Transcription factors in amphioxus7 The complement system of amphioxus8 The oxidative burst system in amphioxus9 Immune effectors in amphioxus 10 Lipid signalling of immune response in amphioxus11 Apoptosis in amphioxus12 Primitive adaptive immune system of amphioxus13 Future research directions