The IL-10GFP(VeRT-X) mouse strain is not suitable for the detection of IL-10 production by granulocytes during lung inflammation

• DOI: 10.1101/2021.02.17.431604
• Publication Date: 2021-02-18T08:40:18Z
• Authors: Müge Özkan; Yusuf Cem Eskiocak; Gerhard Wingender
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; Science; Q; R; Pneumonia; Flow Cytometry; Interleukin-10; 3. Good health; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Mice; 03 medical and health sciences; Medicine; Animals; Myeloid Cells; Research Article; Granulocytes

AbstractThe clear and unequivocal identification of immune effector functions is essential to understand immune responses. The cytokine IL-10 is a critical immune regulator and was shown, for example, to limit pathology during various lung diseases. However, the clear identification of IL-10-producing cells is challenging and, therefore, reporter mouse lines were developed to facilitate their detection. Several such reporter lines utilize GFP, including the IL-10GFP(VeRT-X) reporter strain studied here. In line with previous reports, we found that this IL-10GFPline faithfully reports on the IL-10 production of lymphoid cells. However, we show that the IL-10GFPreporter is not suitable to analyse IL-10 production of myeloid cells during inflammations. During inflammation, the autofluorescence of myeloid cells increased to an extent that entirely masked the IL-10-specific GFP-signal. Our data illustrate a general and important technical caveat using GFP-reporter lines for the analysis of myeloid cells and suggest that previous reports on effector functions of myeloid cells using such GFP-based reporters might require re-evaluation.