Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Jun 1;6(2):169-184.
doi: 10.1002/cpmo.4.

Mouse Models of Asthma

Nincy Debeuf  1   2 , Eline Haspeslagh  1   2 , Mary van Helden  1   2 , Hamida Hammad  1   2 , Bart N Lambrecht  1   2
Affiliations

Mouse Models of Asthma

Nincy Debeuf et al. Curr Protoc Mouse Biol. .

Abstract

Allergic asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the conducting airways characterized by the presence of allergen-specific IgE, Th2 cytokine production, eosinophilic airway inflammation, bronchial hyperreactivity, mucus overproduction, and structural changes in the airways. Investigators have tried to mimic these features of human allergic asthma in murine models. Whereas the surrogate allergen ovalbumin has been extremely valuable for unravelling underlying mechanisms of the disease, murine asthma models depend nowadays on naturally occurring allergens, such as house dust mite (HDM), cockroach, and Alternaria alternata. Here we describe a physiologically relevant model of acute allergic asthma based on sensitization and challenge with HDM extracts, and compare it with the ovalbumin/alum-induced asthma model. Moreover, we propose a detailed readout of the asthma phenotype, determining the degree of eosinophilia in bronchoalveolar lavage fluids by flow cytometry, visualizing goblet cell metaplasia, and measuring Th cytokine production by lung-draining mediastinal lymph node cells restimulated with HDM. © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Keywords: allergic asthma; bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL); goblet cell hyperplasia; house dust mite (HDM); mediastinal lymph nodes (MLNs); murine model; ovalbumin (OVA).

PubMed Disclaimer

References

Literature Cited

    1. Brusselle, G.G. , Kips, J.C. , Tavernier, J.H. , van der Heyden, J.G. , Cuvelier, C.A. , Pauwels, R.A. , and Bluethmann, H. 1994. Attenuation of allergic airway inflammation in IL-4 deficient mice. Clin. Exp. Allergy 24:73-80. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2222.1994.tb00920.x.
    1. Daubeuf, F. and Frossard, N. 2013. Acute asthma models to ovalbumin in the mouse. Curr. Protoc. Mouse Biol. 3:31-37.
    1. Donovan, J. and Brown, P. 2006. Parenteral injections. Curr. Protoc. Immunol. 73:1.6.1-1.6.10.
    1. García-Sánchez, A. , Isidoro-García, M. , García-Solaesa, V. , Sanz, C. , Hernández-Hernández, L. , Padrón-Morales, J. , Lorente-Toledano, F. , and Dávila, I. 2014. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and their importance in asthma. Allergol. Immunopathol. (Madr), pii :S0301-0546(14)00140-2. doi: 10.1016/j.aller.2014.07.004. [Epub ahead of print ]
    1. Gregory, L.G. and Lloyd, C.M. 2011. Orchestrating house dust mite-associated allergy in the lung. Trends Immunol. 32:402-411. doi: 10.1016/j.it.2011.06.006.

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources