Arthritic KRN T cells and wild type T cells from germ free and specific pathogen free mice. Mus musculus

A general defect of GF K/BxN T cell proliferation response toward antigen motivated us to look for the impairment in GF K/BxN T cells that might leads to the low Ab production and reduced disease phenotype seen in GF K/BxN mice. To find the difference between GF and SPF K/BxN T cells in a broad and non-biased fashion, we performed gene-expression profiling of these cells using microarrays. Overall design: All gene expression profiles were obtained from highly purified T cell populations sorted by flow cytometry. To reduce variability, cells from multiple mice were pooled for sorting, and triplicates or quadruplates were generated for all groups. Raw data were preprocessed with the RMA algorithm in GenePattern, and averaged expression values were used for analysis.