Multiple Foreign Gene Delivery Can Induce Antibody Production in Mice

Abstract

Exogenous gene delivery may activate the immune system to generate the corresponding antibody; however, it is unknown whether all of the exogenous genes can induce such immune responses at the same level, and the result of simultaneous delivery of two or more genes is also unknown. To address the question, ELISA was used to determine antibody titers in serum against the most frequent gene doping such as growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor α (IGF-α), and mechano growth factor (MGF), which were delivered into mice by naked vectors. There was no antibody against GH when saline, pCI-neo, or the pCI-GH plasmid alone was injected, but significant antibody was induced when the pCI-GH plasmid was injected in combination with either pCI-MGF or pCI-IGF-I plasmid (p < 0.05). Therefore, not all of exogenous genes can induce such immune response or the induced intensity is different, and multi-gene delivery was more likely than single gene to stimulate the immune system, which may be a potential method to detect gene doping.