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Transcriptomic analysis reveal the responses of dendritic cells to VDBP

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Abstract

Background

Vitamin D binding protein (VDBP) is an essential plasma carrier protein, which plays possible roles in reproductive health, disease and so on. However, the effects of VDBP on immunity have not been fully studied and the pertinent literatures remain very limited.

Objective

In this study, we introduced the exogenous VDBP into DC2.4 and established a stable DC2.4/VDBP cell line to explore the role of this gene in immunity.

Methods

Dendritic cells (DCs), as the most effective antigen presenting cells (APC) found so far, are directly involved in regulating some innate immunity. In order to evaluate the biological role of VDBP in DCs, we stably overexpressed VDBP in DCs, and conducted Cell Counting Kit‑8 (CCK-8 kit) and flow cytometry to detect changes in cell function. CCK-8 kit was used to monitor the viability of DCs after gene overexpression, and flow cytometry was used to detect changes in cell cycle distribution and apoptosis. Subsequently, in order to reveal the mechanism of VDBP regulating DCs, we adopted RNA sequencing (RNA-seq).

Results

CCK-8 results revealed VDBP successfully inhibited viability of DCs. Besides, we found that overexpression of this gene greatly promoted apoptosis and obviously altered the cell cycle distribution of DCs in G1 and G2 phases. Moreover, RNA-seq was carried out and 151 differently expression genes (DEGs) were obtained. In addition, gene differential expression analysis showed that most of them were uniformly enriched in immunity-related pathways.

Conclusion

These results indicated that VDBP greatly repressed proliferation, facilitated apoptosis and changed cell cycle in DCs via altering the expression levels of gene associated with their cellular immunity.

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Funding

The experiment was funded by the Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Project (Approval number 2017ACA192). The funding resource had no role in study design; data collection, analysis and interpretation of data; writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the article for publication.

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Author notes

  1. Biwei Cao and Tao Wen contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Tuina and Rehabilitation Medicine, Hubei Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, 430061, China

    Biwei Cao, Tao Wen, Meng Wei, Yuan Xiong, Wan Liu & Li Zhu

  2. Department of Tuina and Rehabilitation Medicine, Affiliated Hospital of Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, 430061, China

    Biwei Cao, Tao Wen, Meng Wei, Yuan Xiong, Wan Liu & Li Zhu

  3. Department of Tuina and Rehabilitation Medicine, Hubei Province Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Biwei Cao, Tao Wen, Meng Wei, Yuan Xiong, Wan Liu & Li Zhu

  4. First Clinical Medical College, Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, Wuhan, 430061, China

    Jing Zhou

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  1. Biwei Cao
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  2. Tao Wen
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  3. Meng Wei
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  4. Yuan Xiong
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  5. Wan Liu
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  6. Li Zhu
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  7. Jing Zhou
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Correspondence to Jing Zhou.

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Biwei Cao, Tao Wen, Meng Wei, Yuan Xiong, Wan Liu, Li Zhu, and Jing Zhou declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Cao, B., Wen, T., Wei, M. et al. Transcriptomic analysis reveal the responses of dendritic cells to VDBP. Genes Genom 44, 1271–1282 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13258-022-01234-z

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