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- Rudolf-Virchow-Zentrum (2) (remove)
Mesenteric lymph nodes (mLNs) are sentinel sites of enteral immunosurveillance and immune homeostasis. Immune cells from the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) are constantly recruited to the mLNs in steady-state and under inflammatory conditions resulting in the induction of tolerance and immune cells activation, respectively. Surgical dissection and transplantation of lymph nodes (LN) is a technique that has supported seminal work to study LN function and is useful to investigate resident stromal and endothelial cell biology and their cellular interactions in experimental disease models. Here, we provide a detailed protocol of syngeneic mLN transplantation and report assays to analyze effective mLN engraftment in congenic recipients. Transplanted mLNs allow to study T cell activation and proliferation in preclinical mouse models. Donor mLNs proved viable and functional after surgical transplantation and regenerated blood and lymphatic vessels. Immune cells from the host completely colonized the transplanted mLNs within 7-8 weeks after the surgical intervention. After allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT), adoptively transferred allogeneic CD4+ T cells from FVB/N (H-2q) mice homed to the transplanted mLNs in C57BL/6 (H-2b) recipients during the initiation phase of acute graft-versus-host disease (aGvHD). These CD4+ T cells retained full proliferative capacity and upregulated effector and gut homing molecules comparable to those in mLNs from unmanipulated wild-type recipients. Wild type mLNs transplanted into MHCII deficient syngeneic hosts sufficed to activate alloreactive T cells upon allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation, even in the absence of MHCII+ CD11c+ myeloid cells. These data support that orthotopically transplanted mLNs maintain physiological functions after transplantation. The technique of LN transplantation can be applied to study migratory and resident cell compartment interactions in mLNs as well as immune reactions from and to the gut under inflammatory and non-inflammatory conditions.
Familial gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST) are dominant genetic disorders that are caused by germline mutations of the type III receptor tyrosine kinase KIT. While sporadic mutations are frequently found in mastocytosis and GISTs, germline mutations of KIT have only been described in 39 families until now. We detected a novel germline mutation of KIT in exon 11 (p.Lys-558-Asn; K558N) in a patient from a kindred with several GISTs harboring different secondary somatic KIT mutations. Structural analysis suggests that the primary germline mutation alone is not sufficient to release the autoinhibitory region of KIT located in the transmembrane domain. Instead, the KIT kinase module becomes constitutively activated when K558N combines with different secondary somatic mutations. The identical germline mutation in combination with an additional somatic KIT mutation was detected in a second patient of the kindred with seminoma while a third patient within the family had a cutaneous mastocytosis. These findings suggest that the K558N mutation interferes with the juxtamembranous part of KIT, since seminoma and mastocystosis are usually not associated with exon 11 mutations.