Commentary: The Expression of CD123 Can Decrease with Basophil Activation: Implications for the Gating Strategy of the Basophil Activation Test.

Salvatore Chirumbolo

doi:10.3389/fimmu.2016.00260

Abstract

Commentary: The Expression of CD123 Can Decrease with Basophil Activation: Implications for the Gating Strategy of the Basophil Activation Test.

Highlights

The Expression of CD123 Can Decrease with Basophil Activation: Implications for the Gating Strategy of the Basophil Activation Test by Santos AF, Bécares N, Stephens A, Turcanu V, Lack G
A recent article by Santos et al reported that the CD123/HLA-DR protocol used to gate basophils in an flow cytometry (FC) approach could be fully improved by considering the introduction of CD203c as a gating additional molecule, as they reported a degree of correlation between basophil activation and decreased expression of CD123 without making a direct causal link between both the observations (1)
Santos et al reported that while basophil HLA-DR remains unexpressed during any kind of activation, either IgE- or non-IgE-mediated, CD123 is downregulated on basophil membrane, it led to a reduction in CD123-fluorescent cells captured as dots events in the FC analysis and to possible false negatives in the Basophil activation test (BAT) evaluation (1)

Summary

Introduction

Basophil activation test (BAT) is an assay used to diagnose allergy by evaluating the expression of surface molecules in circulating and activated basophils with an in vitro flow cytometry (FC) approach. They showed that, during cellular activation, the expression of membrane CD123, the alpha subunit of the interleukin-3 (IL-3) receptor, is downregulated, leading to a possible loss in the electronic capture of basophils and a false negative outcome of the activation test (1).

Results

Conclusion