Estudio de la expresión de VSTM1 en macrófagos humanos y su posible implicación en el desarrollo de cirrosis hepática

One of the goals of this work was the bibliography study of the gene VSTM1, which encodes an inhibitory receptor recently described on phagocytes. To do this, we reviewed the bibliography from several scientific journals, as well as the sequences that so far now we can find in the main biological databases on the internet. Our results showed that the information available in the different databases was redundant and a different nomenclature was used for unique sequences. Using alignment studies with different bioinformatic tools we established equivalences between the published data. Taking into account the 6 isoforms described, generated by alternative splicing of the RNA, only some of them matched in the data bases revised. Furthermore, we detected a mistake in the sequence ACUU108, where a codon which encodes a serine was translated into glycine. Our next objective was to study the expression profile of the gene VSTM1, using qRT-PCR, on peritoneal macrophages obtained from ascitic fluid from patients with hepatic cirrhosis, and compared it with the expression on peripheral blood macrophages from healthy donors, which we used as a referential population. This pathology is related to an increase of inflammatory mediators that could be produced by a dysregulation of some control mechanisms involved in immune response. qRT-PCR performance using specific primers designed for VSTM1-v1 and v2, showed that these isoforms were expressed on both macrophage populations, and the level of expression was higher for the transcript which encodes the membrane protein (v1) than for the secreted one (v2). Moreover, we described that gene expression of VSTM1-v1 increases during macrophage differentiation. Nevertheless, although a tendency to a lower expression in cirrhotic macrophages was appreciated, this was not statistical significant.