Short project summary

I study the immunological niche conformance of different cave- and surface dwelling populations of Mexican tetras (Astyanax mexicanus) which differ in parasite abundance and diversity and immune investment strategy. My project consists of field work taking physiological and environmental measurements from wild cave- and surface populations as well as experiments in the laboratory where we challenge the immune system of individual fish with different parasite antigen solutions from the field to test for their degree of niche conformance. This includes methods such as qPCR, image-based flow cytometry and single-cell RNA sequencing.