Abstract
Respiratory viral infections have been associated with an increased incidence of allergic asthma. However, the mechanisms by which respiratory infections facilitate allergic airway disease are incompletely understood.We previously showed that exposure to a low dose of house dust mite (HDM) resulted in enhanced HDM-mediated allergic airway inflammation, and, importantly, marked airway hyperreactivity only when allergen exposure occurred during an acute influenza A infection. In this study, we evaluated the impact of concurrent influenza infection and allergen exposure at the genomic level, using whole-genome micro-array. Our data showed that, in contrast to exposure to a low dose of HDM, influenza A infection led to a dramatic increase in gene expression, particularly of TLRs, C-type lectin receptors, several complement components, as well as FcεR1. Additionally, we observed increased expression of a number of genes encoding chemokines and cytokines associated with the recruitment of proinflammatory cells. Moreover, HDM exposure in the context of an influenza A infection resulted in the induction of unique genes, including calgranulin A (S100a8), an endogenous damage-associated molecular pattern and TLR4 agonist. In addition, we observed significantly increased expression of serum amyloid A (Saa3) and serine protease inhibitor 3n (Serpina3n). This study showed that influenza infection markedly increased the expression of multiple gene classes capable of sensing allergens and amplifying the ensuing immune-inflammatory response. We propose that influenza A infection primes the lung environment in such a way as to lower the threshold of allergen responsiveness, thus facilitating the emergence of a clinically significant allergic phenotype. Copyright © 2012 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 832-843 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | The Journal of Immunology |
Volume | 188 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 14 2011 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: This work was supported in part by the Canadian Institute of Health Research andMedImmune LLC. A.A.-G. holds a scholar award from the King Abdullah Universityof Science and Technology, and M.J. holds a Senior Canada Research Chair inImmunobiology of Respiratory Disease and Allergy.
This publication acknowledges KAUST support, but has no KAUST affiliated authors.