Differences in lymphocyte gene expression between tolerant and syngeneic liver grafted rats

Induction of tolerance to allogeneic donor grafts is a clinically desirable goal in bone marrow and solid organ transplantation. We have taken the advantage of DNA microarray technology to investigate gene expression mechanism in regulatory cells. In the present study, using a tacrolimus (FK506) induced tolerance of the fully mismatched liver allograft rat model, we demonstrated that, in contrast with peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBLs) from syngeneic recipients, PBLs taken from tolerant recipients 100 days after transplantation were able to suppress the in vitro proliferation of allogeneic PBLs and to prolong the survival of second syngeneic recipients. We also compared messenger RNA profiles in PBLs from tolerant recipients with those from syngeneic recipients using a DNA microarray with probe sets corresponding to more than 8000 rat genes. There were 96 up-regulated and 103 down-regulated genes in the tolerant recipients. In the up-regulated group, there were 76 known genes and 20 expressed sequence tags (ESTs). In the down-regulated groups, there were 87 known genes and 16 ESTs. Our data indicated that FK506 treatment induced tolerance and expansion of regulatory cells and the DNA microarray technology was useful for this application and provided many informative insights into the mechanism of lymphocyte regulation.