Many of the costs associated with deception - from being discovered as a liar by those around you to the personal immunological costs of suppressing some known truth - imply conscious awareness of the truth and the lie.
It should be noted that when no parasite effect on FMR is detected, it may not necessarily imply no immunological costs, as the response could be dependant on the immunological "readiness" of the host which could present a constitutive immune response.
In this study we examined immunological costs in females only.
Considering the high immunological costs incurred from non-selective MHC I molecule downregulation as a strategy for CD8+ T-cell escape, MHC ligand-specific effects could offer a way out.
Whether MHC-biased social behaviours are adaptive cannot be fully understood without first determining their immunological costs and benefits, both affecting the individual itself and the conspecifics with which it interacts [ 12].
In D. melanogaster immunological defense against the parasitoid Asobara tabida caused declines in desiccation and starvation resistance and the magnitude of this cost varied among iso-female lines [ 25], however, in this study it is impossible to distinguish immunological costs from costs associated with parasitism.
These coordinated effects tell us that the level of MHC I down-regulation aiming at CD8+ T-cell evasion causes high immunological costs which must be compensated for by extensive genomic investments in factors that rescue the vulnerable HCMV-infected cell from NK cell recognition.
The analysis of immunological deployment costs can focus on physiological costs, (i.e., the immediate cost of immune system activation), or evolutionary (genetic) costs, (i.e., whether there is genetic variation for the physiological cost experienced).
However, such possible applications involving proteins or genes transferred with virus vectors have encountered many problems, including high cost, immunological reactions, viral infection, etc.
