Background: In the concordant hamster-to-rat cardiac xenograft model, recipients treated with cobra venom factor for the first 10 days following transplantation and daily with Cyclosporine A (CsA) do not reject their grafts. However, when CsA is withdrawn on day 40, an acute cellular rejection occurs within 4 +/- 1 days. Allografts performed in the same conditions are rejected within 18 +/- 4 days.
Methods: In this model, we have compared graft infiltrating T cells through both a quantitative (number of Vbeta transcripts) and qualitative (CDR3 length distribution) assessment of the T cell receptor (TCR) beta chain transcriptome in allo- and xeno-transplantations.
Results: We report striking differences in TCR usage at day 15 following allo- and xeno-transplantation as well as during rejection following CsA withdrawal. The number of Vbeta transcripts was high in both rejected allo- and xenografts. However, whereas in xenografts acute rejection occurred without skewing of Vbeta CDR3 length distribution, T cells infiltrating allografts during rejection after CsA interruption had a highly altered CDR3 length distribution pattern. In addition, using a correspondence factor analysis of the beta chain transcriptome, we show that some families can clusterize and can discriminate allo- or xeno-patterns at the level of both the number of Vbeta transcripts and the CDR3 length distribution.
Conclusions: Our data show that, in vivo, even in the hamster-to-rat concordant combination, the anti-xenograft T cell response is strong and will likely represent another challenge for xenotransplantation.