Immunity and heat stress in invertebrates: an uneasy equilibrium

The heat shock response (HSR) and innate immune response represent fundamental, evolutionarily conserved defences in invertebrates, enabling survival under diverse environmental stresses. These pathways are tightly interconnected, with shared regulatory components that modulate the activity of key transcription factors such as heat shock factors and immune regulators. This overlap facilitates both cooperative and competitive transcriptional dynamics, allowing organisms to prioritize gene expression in response to concurrent stressors. Elucidating the molecular crosstalk between these pathways remains a critical area of investigation, with implications for understanding integrated stress physiology. In the context of climate change, rising temperatures and increased environmental variability may exacerbate stress exposure, reshaping these regulatory networks. Such shifts could influence invertebrate fitness, alter species distributions, and drive changes in pest emergence and disease transmission, with significant ecological and agricultural consequences.A key challenge in invertebrate stress biology is predicting the bidirectional interplay between the heat shock response (HSR) and innate immune pathways under simultaneous environmental and pathogenic stressors. Although these cascades share regulatory components—such as kinases, co-factors, and phosphatases—the molecular interfaces governing their coordination remain insufficiently characterized. This gap constrains our ability to anticipate how combined stressors influence infection outcomes, organismal resilience, and ecological dynamics.Addressing this problem demands integrative approaches that leverage recent advances in multi-omics alongside predictive computational modelling to elucidate causal relationships and effects of heat stress on invertebrate immunity. Critically, expanding research beyond traditional model organisms is essential. Investigations in non-model systems will reveal how HSR–immune crosstalk shapes vector competence and disease susceptibility. Of the four most economically important invertebrates- honey bees, shrimp, oysters, and the silk moth; all have come under pressure from novel or increased disease pressure, illustrating the need for better understanding of invertebrate immunity. In the context of climate change, such insights are vital to predict shifts in disease transmission, pest emergence, and the stability of food systems, including the efficacy of biological control strategies.Scope and Information for Authors:-Molecular Crosstalk Between Heat Shock and Immune PathwaysIdentification and characterization of shared regulatory components (e.g., kinases, transcription factors, co-factors) that mediate integration or competition between HSR and immune signalling.-Systems-Level and Multi-Omics Approaches to Stress Integration-Application of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and computational modelling, to map and predict outcomes of concurrent thermal and pathogenic stress.-Functional Genomics of Stress–Immunity Interactions-Use of CRISPR, RNAi, and other perturbation tools to dissect causal relationships and regulatory hierarchies underlying HSR–immune coordination.-Non-Model Invertebrates: Expanding Biological Insight-Studies focusing on ecologically and economically important species (e.g., pollinators, aquaculture species, disease vectors) to uncover diverse stress–immune strategies.-Climate Change Impacts on Invertebrate Health and Disease Dynamics-Investigation of how elevated temperatures and environmental variability reshape immune competence, vector capacity, and pathogen susceptibility.-Implications for Agriculture and Food Security-Effects of stress–immune interactions on pollination services, aquaculture sustainability, pest outbreaks, and the reliability of biological control strategies.Conflict of Interest statementDr. Zachery Belak, Founder, CEO, and Principal Scientist, owner of Proxima Research and Development, a contract research company. Proxima does not develop intellectual property for itself; it conducts research only for clients under contract. Topic editors: Humberto Lanz-Mendoza, Zachery Belak, Conde Renaud Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83127/immunity-and-heat-stress-in-invertebrates-an-uneasy-equilibrium