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. Mucosal hemocytes showed overexpression of genes related to cell motility, cytokine activity, signaling, and cell adhesion, supporting the hypothesis that they may have sentinel functions. Despite a consistent dichotomy in gene expression between granulocytes and agranulocytes across both body fluids, it was more pronounced in circulatory hemocytes. Circulatory granulocytes showed functions linked to phagocytosis and pathogen killing, whereas circulatory agranulocytes overexpressed genes associated with mitosis and early inflammation compared to their mucosal counterparts. To our knowledge, this is the first study combining flow cytometry sorting and transcriptomic methods to characterize hemocytes from different body fluids in a marine invertebrate. Results underline the potential role of mucosal hemocytes as immune sentinels, although more studies, possibly using single-cell transcriptomic methods and functional assays associated with pathogen challenge experiments, are needed to probe their specific functions.
Abdallah et al. (Mon,) studied this question.