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Research Paper|Volume 10, Issue 3|pp 358—370

Intestinal immunity in hypopituitary dwarf mice: effects of age

Xin Wang1, Justin Darcy1,2, Chuan Cai3, Junfei Jin4, Andrzej Bartke2, Deliang Cao1,3
  • 1Department of Medical Microbiology, Immunology, and Cell Biology, Southern Illinois University, School of Medicine, Springfield, IL 62702, USA
  • 2Department of Internal Medicine, Southern Illinois University, School of Medicine, Springfield, IL 62702, USA
  • 3Division of Stem Cell Regulation and Application, State Key Laboratory of Chinese Medicine Powder and Medicine Innovation in Hunan (incubation), Hunan University of Chinese Medicine, Changsha, Hunan 410208, China
  • 4China-USA Lipids in Health and Disease Research Center, Guilin Medical University, Guilin 541001, Guangxi, China
Received: January 2, 2018Accepted: February 23, 2018Published: March 2, 2018
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101393

Copyright: © 2018 Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Hypopituitary dwarf mice demonstrate advantages of longevity, but little is known of their colon development and intestinal immunity. Herein we found that Ames dwarf mice have shorter colon and colonic crypts, but larger ratio of mesenteric lymph nodes (MLNs) over body weight than age-matched wild type (WT) mice. In the colonic lamina propria (cLP) of juvenile Ames mice, more inflammatory neutrophils (Ā: 0.15% vs. 0.03% in WT mice) and monocytes (Ā: 7.97% vs. 5.15%) infiltrated, and antigen presenting cells CD11c+ dendritic cells (Ā: 1.39% vs. 0.87%), CD11b+ macrophages (Ā: 3.22% vs. 0.81%) and gamma delta T (γδ T) cells (Ā: 5.56% vs. 1.35%) were increased. In adult Ames dwarf mice, adaptive immune cells, such as IL-17 producing CD4+ T helper (Th17) cells (Ā: 8.3% vs. 4.7%) were augmented. In the MLNs of Ames dwarf mice, the antigen presenting and adaptive immune cells also altered when compared to WT mice, such as a decrease of T-regulatory (Treg) cells in juvenile Ames mice (Ā: 7.7% vs.10.5%), but an increase of Th17 cells (Ā: 0.627% vs.0.093%). Taken together, these data suggest that somatotropic signaling deficiency influences colon development and intestinal immunity.