Effect of allergen sensitization on gene expression in dendritic cells from neonates of asthmatic vs control mothers

This study aims to demonstrate the link between epigenome-wide methylation aberrations at birth and genomic transcriptional changes upon allergen sensitization that occur in the neonatal dendritic cells (DC) due to maternal asthma. In an in vivo model reproducing human epidemiology findings, maternal but not paternal asthma predisposes the neonate to increased asthma risk, the effect is allergen-independent and is not genetic or environmental. Earlier we demonstrated that neonates of asthmatic mothers are born with a functional skew in splenic DCs that mediates the early-life asthma origin. These allergen-naive cells convey allergy responses to normal recipients, however minimal to no transcriptional or phenotypic changes were found to explain the functional pro-allergic alterations. In this study we profiled both allergen-nave dendritic cells, and cells after allergen sensitization in vivo. We found that while allergen-naive DCs from asthma-at-risk neonates have minimal transcriptional change compared to controls, upon allergen sensitization, multiple genes with pre-existing epigenetic alterations show significant transcriptional change. .

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Mikhaylova L, Zhang Y, Kobzik L, Fedulov AV