Bat-mouse bone marrow chimera: a novel animal model for dissecting the uniqueness of the bat immune system

Yong, Kylie Su Mei; Ng, Justin Han Jia; Her, Zhisheng; Hey, Ying Ying; Tan, Sue Yee; Tan, Wilson Wei Sheng; Irac, Sergio Erdal; Liu, Min; Chan, Xue Ying; Gunawan, Merry; Foo, Randy Jee Hiang; Low, Dolyce Hong Wen; Mendenhall, Ian Hewitt; Chionh, Yok Teng; Dutertre, Charles-Antoine; Chen, Qingfeng; Wang, Lin-Fa

Unlike the optimised humanized mouse model, our bat-mice were created with crude whole bone marrow cells without any hematopoietic stem cell modification 29, 55 . Further optimisation is required to reveal the full potential of this novel model. An important point to note is that all phenotypic characterisation of bat immune cells derived from our bat-mice thus far were solely based upon the limited bat-reactive antibodies we possess. Though a larger panel of reagents had recently been established 42 , they were optimised for Pteropus alecto with limited cross-reactivity against E. spelaea. Various immune cells, especially T/NK cells, identified in our bat-mice to date will be further investigated when more reagents are available. More research is currently in progress to establish an E. spelaea cross-reactive panel to better characterise its immune cell profile, and subsequently help address our above-mentioned limitations.