Effect of high salinity on cell growth and protein production of Antarctic ice microalgae Chlamydomonas sp. ICE-L

Antarctic ice microalgae Chlamydomonas sp. ICE-L can survive and thrive in Antarctic sea ice. In this study, Chlamydomonas sp. ICE-L could survive at the salinity of 132% NaCl. SDS-PAGE showed that the density of 2 bands (26 and 36 kD) decreased obviously at the salinity of 99% NaCl compared to at the salinity of 33% NaCl. The soluble proteins in Chlamydomonas sp. ICE-L grown under salinity of 33% and 99% NaCl were compared by 2-D gel electro-phoresis. After shocking with high salinity, 8 protein spots were found to disappear, and the density of 28 protein spots decreased. In addition, 19 protein spots were enhanced or induced, including one new peptide(51kD).The changes of proteins might be correlated with the resistance for Chlamydomonas sp. ICE-L to high salinity

Dendritic cells pulsed with placental gp96 promote tumor-reactive immune responses.

Defining and loading of immunogenic and safe cancer antigens remain a major challenge for designing dendritic cell (DC)-based cancer vaccines. In this study, we defined a prototype strategy of using DC-based vaccines pulsed with placenta-derived heat shock protein gp96 to induces anti-tumor T cell responses. Placental gp96 was efficiently taken up by CD11c+ bone marrow-derived DCs (BMDCs) and resulted in moderate BMDC maturation. Splenocytes and cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) generated with mouse BMDCs pulsed with placental gp96 specifically lysed B16 melanoma and LLC lung carcinoma cells. In both transplantable melanoma and lung carcinoma mice models, immunization with placental gp96-stimulated BMDCs led to a significant decrease in tumor growth and mouse mortality with respect to mice treated with liver gp96-pulsed BMDCs or placental gp96 alone. This vaccine induced strong cross-reactive tumor-specific T cell responses. Our results revealed that DCs pulsed with placenta-derived gp96 represent an effective immunotherapy to induce tumor-reactive immune responses, possibly via loading DCs with its associated carcinoembryonic antigens