When a human transgene is expressed upon activation of TeT-On system, is there any immune rejection of the transgene ? I looked in a lot of paper using this system but this question was not adressed in those papers. Does anyone have some experience in the field ?
Thanks
Expressing human genes in mice generally does not promote an immune response and is rarely a problem. The only circumstances under which you might stimulate an immune response is if the protein is secreted or has an extracellular domain and is different enough in sequence to be recognized as foreign. Most transgenes are either expressed inside the cell, cytoplasmic or nuclear, and thus are never seen by the adaptive immune system. Or, the transgenic proteins are similar enough to the endogenous mouse homologues so that they would be recognized as self.