Current Bioinformatics ( IF 4 ) Pub Date : 2021-01-31 , DOI: 10.2174/1574893615999200818155048 Yi Zhao 1 , Yujie Zhang 1 , Jie Zhou 1 , Lijuan Wang 1 , Jimin Shi 1 , Yamin Tan 1 , Yi Luo 1 , He Huang 1 , Zhen Cai 1
Objectives: Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is the most common complication after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) and remains to be a major cause of mortality. Activation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR-4) by lipopolysaccharide induces the NF-κB signaling pathway to release critical proinflammatory cytokines and increases the recipient response to GVHD. In order to clarify the role of TLR-4 in the occurrence of acute GVHD after HSCT, we collected 208 samples from HSCT recipients and their human lecucyte antigen identical donors to test the hypothesis that TLR-4polymorphism in the recipients or donors influence the risk of acute GVHD in allogeneic HSCT recipients.
Methods: TLR-4 Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile polymorphisms of each sample were examined by using DNA sequencing and polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism methods.
Results: No homozygous or heterozygous variant alleles of the Asp299Gly or Thr339Ile polymorphism were detected in any samples in our study. Our results demonstrate that TLR-4 Asp299Gly and Thr399Ile polymorphisms might be very rare in the Chinese population (Eastern China and Taiwan region).
Conclusion: The results of this study cannot confirm the role of TLR-4 mutations in the pathogenesis of GVHD in humans, yet we reach a definite conclusion by a TLR-4 knockout murine GVHD model in our ongoing project.