Guinea pigs are an ideal animal model for the study of several infectious diseases, including tuberculosis, legionellosis, brucellosis, and spotted fever rickettsiosis. In comparison to the murine model, clinical signs in guinea pigs are more representative of disease in humans, the guinea pig immune system is more similar to that of the human, and their large size offers logistic advantages for sample collection while following disease progression. Unfortunately, the advantage of using guinea pigs in biomedical research, particularly in understanding the immune response to infectious agents, is limited in large part by the paucity of available reagents and lack of genetically manipulated strains. Here, we expand the utility of guinea pigs in biomedical research by establishing an optimized five-color/seven-parameter polychromatic flow cytometric assay for immunophenotyping lymphocytes. This assay fills a need for immunophenotyping peripheral blood lymphocytes and is an improvement over current published flow cytometry assays for guinea pigs. We anticipate that our approach will be an important starting point for developing new assays to evaluate the cellular immune response to infectious diseases in the guinea pig model. Importantly, we are currently using this assay for evaluating immunity to spotted fever rickettsiosis in a guinea pig-tick-Rickettsia system, where CD8+ T cells are a critical contributor to the immune response. Developing resources to utilize the guinea pig more effectively will enhance our ability to understand infectious diseases where the guinea pig would otherwise be the ideal model.

中文翻译：

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优化的五色/七参数流式细胞仪，用于豚鼠外周血淋巴细胞的免疫表型分析。

豚鼠是研究几种传染病的理想动物模型，包括肺结核，军团菌病，布鲁氏菌病和斑点热立克次氏病。与鼠模型相比，豚鼠的临床体征更能代表人类疾病，豚鼠的免疫系统与人类的免疫系统更为相似，并且它们的大体积为疾病发展提供了逻辑上的优势。不幸的是，在生物医学研究中使用豚鼠的优势，特别是在了解对传染原的免疫反应方面，其优势在很大程度上受到可用试剂的缺乏和缺乏基因操纵菌株的限制。这里，通过建立用于免疫表型淋巴细胞的优化的五色/七参数多色流式细胞术，我们扩大了豚鼠在生物医学研究中的用途。该测定满足了对外周血淋巴细胞进行免疫表型测定的需要，并且是对当前发表的豚鼠流式细胞术测定的改进。我们预计，我们的方法将成为开发新方法以评估豚鼠模型对传染性疾病的细胞免疫反应的重要起点。重要的是，我们目前正在使用这种测定方法来评估豚鼠-ick-立克次体系统中点状立克次体病的免疫力，其中CD8 + T细胞是免疫反应的关键因素。