Transcriptomic profiling of mice receiving immunoprophylactic and immunotherapeutic hypoallergen-encoding DNA vaccine. Mus musculus

RNA-seq analysis was performed to define the changes in gene expression of small intestine samples from mice pre-vaccinated and treated with MEM49-encoding DNA vaccine to elucidate the modulatory mechanism of DNA vaccine. Overall design: DNA vaccine was constructed by expressing the hypoallergen MEM49 in the plasmid pCI-Neo. Balb/c mice were intradermally injected with 100 mg DNA vaccine prior to or after shrimp tropomyosin sensitization. Non-sensitized mice and sensitized mice receiving PBS or mock plasmid as sham treatment were included as negative and positive controls. Total RNA was extracted from ileum sections of the small intestine from the negative control, positive control group, mice pre-vaccinated with MEM49-encoding DNA vaccine (P-MEM49) and mice treated with MEM49-encoding DNA vaccine (T-MEM49). Samples from three animals from each group were pooled as one replicate and two replicates from each group were used for RNA-sequencing on the Ion-Proton Platform. Subsequent transcriptomic analysis identified significant gene expression changes related to the induction of tolerogenic dendritic cells and regulatory T cells in the DNA vaccine pre-vaccinated and treated mice.