Gene expression analysis of hypersensitivity to mosquito bite, chronic active EBV infection and NK/T-lymphoma/leukemia

AbstractThe human herpes virus, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), is a known oncogenic virus and plays important roles in life-threatening T/NK-cell lymphoproliferative disorders (T/NK-cell LPD) such as hypersensitivity to mosquito bite (HMB), chronic active EBV infection (CAEBV), and NK/T-cell lymphoma/leukemia. During the clinical courses of HMB and CAEBV, patients frequently develop malignant lymphomas and the diseases passively progress sequentially. In the present study, gene expression of CD16(−)CD56(+)-, EBV(+) HMB, CAEBV, NK-lymphoma, and NK-leukemia cell lines, which were established from patients, was analyzed using oligonucleotide microarrays and compared to that of CD56brightCD16dim/− NK cells from healthy donors. Principal components analysis showed that CAEBV and NK-lymphoma cells were relatively closely located, indicating that they had similar expression profiles. Unsupervised hierarchal clustering analyses of microarray data and gene ontology analysis revealed specific gene clusters and identifie...