Background & objective: The periphery T and B lymphocytes are most important immune cells in a body. Analysis for the gene expression profiles of the immune cells will contribute to the understanding of the biological essence of immune suppression. The advanced technique of DNA microarray make it possible to monitor the expression of thousands of genes simultaneously in one hybridization experiment until recently. In this paper, the authors investigated the genes differentially expression in periphery lymphocytes between the patients with Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma(NPC) and health donors to explore the features of gene expression in immune cells of NPC patients.
Methods: The BioDoor10s/D chips containing 2000 spots of cDNAs were used to investigate the difference of the expression. Both the mRNAs from periphery lymphocytes of NPC patients (2 x 10(8)) and health donors(2 x 10(8)) were reversely transcribed to cDNA with the incorporation of fluorescent(cy5 and cy3) labeled dUTP to prepare the hybridization probes. After hybridization, BioDoor10s/D chips were scanned for the fluorescent intensity. The differentially expressed genes were screened.
Results: The total of 62 genes has differentially expression in NPC periphery lymphocytes. The number of over- and lower-expressed genes were 5 and 57, respectively. There were 3 genes coding for signal transductive proteins in 5 over-expressed genes. Five genes coding for signal transductive proteins were involved in 9 genes with lowest-expression (cy5/cy3 > or = 0.3).
Conclusion: There was the consistent tendency toward lower-expressed gene in periphery lymphocytes from the patients with NPC. The disorder in signal transductive function of lymphocytes may be a factor distinguishing NPC immunity from the health one. Improvement of gene expressing profil may also be a way to enhance immune function in tumor patients.