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Infection and Immunity, June 2006, p. 3668-3672, Vol. 74, No. 6
0019-9567/06/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/IAI.00196-06
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Constitutive Differences in Gene Expression Profiles Parallel Genetic Patterns of Susceptibility to Tuberculosis in Mice¶
Marianna O. Orlova,1,2
Konstantin B. Majorov,1
Irina V. Lyadova,1
Eugenii B. Eruslanov,1,
Cyr E. M'lan,3,
Celia M. T. Greenwood,3
Erwin Schurr,2,
and
Alexander S. Apt1,
*
Laboratory for Immunogenetics, Central Institute for Tuberculosis, Yauza Alley 2, Moscow 107564, Russia,1
McGill Centre for the Study of Host Resistance, Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, Montreal, H3G 1A4 Quebec, Canada,2
Program in Genetics and Genomic Biology, Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute, Toronto, Ontario, Canada3
Received 3 February 2006/
Returned for modification 8 March 2006/
Accepted 16 March 2006

ABSTRACT
Interstitial lung macrophages from tuberculosis-susceptible
I/St and tuberculosis-resistant A/Sn mice demonstrated significant
constitutive differences in gene expression levels, whereas
in vitro infection of these cells with
Mycobacterium tuberculosis had only a modulatory impact on gene expression. We conclude
that intrinsic gene expression profiles are an important determinant
of tuberculosis pathogenesis in mice.

TEXT
The primary host cells for
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which
is the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), are mature tissue
macrophages. The specific host response pathways allowing
M. tuberculosis to take up residence in macrophages and the host
cell factors that underlie the
M. tuberculosis-macrophage interplay
are largely unknown. We have previously demonstrated that in
A/Sn and I/St mice, which are genetically resistant and susceptible
to tuberculosis, respectively (
7,
16), only freshly isolated
interstitial lung macrophages, and not peritoneal or spleen-
or bone marrow-derived macrophages, strictly followed the genetic
pattern of tuberculosis susceptibility/resistance (
11). In addition,
the resistance phenotype can be readily transferred with bone
marrow cells from resistant F
1 donors into irradiated susceptible
I/St recipients (
12). To further identify host response genes
involved in early
M. tuberculosis-macrophage interactions, we
conducted a series of microarray gene expression experiments
employing lung macrophages from A/Sn and I/St mice.
Interstitial lung macrophages, isolated as described earlier (11), were either infected with M. tuberculosis H37Rv at a multiplicity of infection of 5:1 for 24 h or cultured under the same conditions without infection (control). The efficiency of infection was 50% to 60%, as demonstrated by auramine staining of fixed macrophages, with no observed interstrain difference in mycobacterial uptake (data not shown). RNA extracted from infected and control macrophages of I/St and A/Sn mice (RNeasy minikit; QIAGEN, California) was hybridized to murine genome U74Av2 microarrays (www.affymetrix.com). The data were analyzed with the Significance Analysis of Microarrays software (SAM; http://www-stat.stanford.edu/
tibs/SAM//index.html). For the analysis, the gene expression levels in macrophages of I/St and A/Sn mice were compared either before or after infection. We considered genes that had d scores (absolute values) of
2.0 to be significant. The d score is similar to a t statistic, but a small constant is added to the standard error to reduce the variability in its estimate. A better measure of statistical significance can be obtained by examining the false detection rate (FDR) associated with the magnitude of the differences between strains, with adjustment for the number of genes tested (24). Accurate empirical estimates of the FDR were obtained from the permutation analysis built into the SAM software, employing a d score (absolute value) of 2.0 corresponding to an estimated FDR of 1% (24). Microarray data analysis led to the identification of 152 genes with significant differentials in expression either before or after infection of lung macrophages of the two strains (Table 1; see also supplemental material S1).
Generally, lung macrophages from susceptible I/St mice demonstrated
significantly higher expression levels of cytokine/chemokine
genes, including the genes for interleukin 11 (
Il-11),
Il-6,
Cxcl-13, and
Cxcl-14 (Table
1), than did their A/Sn counterparts.
In contrast, only three cytokine/chemokine genes (
Cxcl-10,
Cxcl-9,
and
Il-17) were expressed at significantly higher levels in
macrophages from resistant A/Sn mice. In the group of immune
response genes, I/St macrophages expressed only three genes
(
Ifi205,
Ifi202, and
Saa3) at a higher level than did A/Sn macrophages.
Conversely, a large number of genes belonging to this class
were expressed at significantly higher levels in A/Sn macrophages
(Table
1), suggesting their critical role in the development
of the immune response at an early stage of infection. The majority
of genes encoding receptor/cell surface molecules that are potentially
important for the on-time activation of protective mechanisms
after infection were highly expressed in lung macrophages of
A/Sn mice. Likewise, genes encoding signal transduction molecules
were generally expressed at higher levels in A/Sn macrophages
(see supplemental material S1). Interestingly, matrix metalloproteinase
8, one of the extracellular matrix proteins involved in the
processing of extracellular matrices and wound healing (
20),
was shown to be expressed at significantly higher levels in
A/Sn macrophages. Differences in constitutive expression levels
for selected genes (
Il-11,
Il-6,
Mmp8,
Cxcl-14,
Cxcl-13, and
Saa3) were confirmed by real-time reverse transcription-PCR
(RT-PCR) (Table
2; see also supplemental material S2) using
mRNAs obtained in three additional independent experiments.
Constitutive higher expression of
Il-6 by macrophages of susceptible
I/St mice is consistent with the data of Keller and colleagues,
who demonstrated an approximately 10-fold increase in
Il-6 expression
in infected macrophages from TB-susceptible but not from TB-resistant
mice (
10). IL-6 is a pleiotropic cytokine which is produced
by a variety of cells, including macrophages (
14,
26), with
numerous types of cell targets.
M. tuberculosis-infected macrophages
produce IL-6, which inhibits gamma interferon-responsive genes
in macrophages and inhibits eradication of infection (
14).
Remarkably, the high expression level of Il-6 by macrophages of I/St mice is accompanied by elevated levels of Cxcl-13 (Scyb13) expression (Tables 1 and 2). Cxcl-13, the B-cell-homing chemokine, is produced by macrophages (2, 9) and dendritic cells (3). Goya and colleagues (8) have shown that prolonged production of IL-6 in the lungs leads to formation of pulmonary lesions that have lymphoid tissue-like structure, where the chemokine gene Cxcl-13 is highly expressed. Significantly higher expression levels of Il-6 and Cxcl-13 by lung macrophages of susceptible I/St mice (Tables 1 and 2), in conjunction with extremely high levels of specific immunoglobulin G2a antibody responses in these mice (18), strongly suggest that severe TB inflammation in the lungs of these mice involves a nonprotective B-cell component. This suggestion is further supported by a recent finding of Ulrichs et al. (25), who demonstrated the formation of well-organized B-cell foci in the vicinity of tuberculous lesions in lung tissue surgically removed from TB patients with a rapidly progressing severe form of the disease.
An exciting new finding obtained in this study is the high level of Il-11 expression by lung macrophages. IL-11 is a pleiotropic cytokine with anti-inflammatory activity when expressed at moderate levels (23, 27), but its overexpression may have a significant proinflammatory effect (22, 28). The production of IL-11 had previously been described for lung fibroblasts, airway epithelial cells (5, 6), and antigen-presenting cells after infection with respiratory syncytial virus (1). To demonstrate that Il-11 is indeed expressed by lung macrophages and not by contaminating lung fibroblasts, we developed fibroblast cultures from lung stroma of I/St and A/Sn mice and compared the levels of expression of Il-11 and Cxcl-14 in these cells and in interstitial lung macrophages. Cxcl-14 is the mouse ortholog of the human breast- and kidney-expressed chemokine gene (BRAK) and is constitutively expressed by fibroblasts in a number of mouse organs, including lungs. The results of this comparison are presented in Fig. 1. I/St and A/Sn lung macrophages expressed, respectively, 60- and 30-fold-higher levels of Il-11 than their corresponding lung fibroblasts. Conversely, I/St and A/Sn lung fibroblasts expressed 8- and 50-fold-higher levels of Cxcl-14 than their corresponding lung macrophages. These results show that lung macrophages are major producers of Il-11 and that the high expression levels of Il-11 in macrophages of tuberculosis-susceptible I/St mice compared to expression levels of Il-11 in tuberculosis-resistant A/Sn mice offer a possible explanation for the development of severe pathology in the lungs of M. tuberculosis-infected I/St mice (7, 16, 18).
While several studies have analyzed the response of host macrophages
to mycobacterial infection (
4,
10,
13,
15,
17,
19,
21,), none
of these studies employed ex vivo-isolated lung macrophages,
the predominant cell type naturally infected with
M. tuberculosis,
and only one study used a combination of resistant and susceptible
strains of mice (
10). However, all of these studies reported
significant
M. tuberculosis-triggered host gene expression changes.
Surprisingly, we did not observe major changes in gene expression
by lung macrophages of either I/St or A/Sn mice following 24-h
infection with
M. tuberculosis H37Rv. Hence, we tested whether
overly conservative criteria for significant gene expression
changes underlie this finding. It appeared that even a reduction
in stringency of the analysis with an FDR up to 75% did not
allow the reproduction of previously reported results (
4,
10,
13,
17,
21). In a final set of experiments, we selected eight
genes (
Il-6,
Saa3,
Slpi,
Ccl5,
Cxcl-5,
Cxcl-10,
Mrc1, and
Mmp9)
that had been reported to undergo significant expression changes
following
M. tuberculosis infection of murine bone marrow-derived
macrophages (
4,
21,
10,
17). We found that infection of interstitial
lung macrophages with
M. tuberculosis does not lead to changes
in the expression level of these genes (change of

1.5-fold [absolute
value]) (data not shown). These results support the hypothesis
that different types of macrophages respond differently to
M. tuberculosis infection and argue against the suggestion that
too-stringent criteria had been used in the microarray analysis.
In summary, by employing global analysis of gene expression, we observed a statistically well-defined signature of gene expression differences among interstitial macrophages from A/Sn and I/St mice. These interstrain gene expression differences provide a rational basis for a mechanistic framework of the genetically controlled tuberculosis resistance and susceptibility displayed by A/Sn and I/St mice. By contrast, we were unable to reveal significant M. tuberculosis-triggered gene expression changes in interstitial lung macrophages. It is possible that the in vitro infection experiments are not a correlate of the response of the whole animal. This possibility appears unlikely since lung macrophages faithfully repeat the pattern of resistance and susceptibility observed at the whole-animal level. It is more likely that intrinsic gene expression levels are an important determinant of TB pathogenesis in the mouse and that constitutive genetically controlled gene expression in lung macrophages is an area that requires more careful consideration in the study of TB pathogenesis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by NIH grant HL 68532 and the Canadian
Genetic Disease Network.
We thank Scotty Adams (Trudeau Institute, Saranac Lake, NY) for help with the quantitative RT-PCR primers and Serge Mostowy (McGill University) for helpful comments on the experimental design of the study.

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Laboratory for Immunogenetics, Central Institute for Tuberculosis, Yauza Alley 2, Moscow 107564, Russia. Phone: 7095 268 78 10. Fax: 7095 963 80 00. E-mail:
asapt{at}aha.ru.

¶ Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://iai.asm.org/. 
Editor: A. D. O'Brien
Present address: Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA 02115. 
Present address: Department of Statistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269. 
Joint senior authors. 

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Infection and Immunity, June 2006, p. 3668-3672, Vol. 74, No. 6
0019-9567/06/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/IAI.00196-06
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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