Development of a flow cytometric assay to quantify lymphocyte adhesion to cytokine-stimulated human endothelial and biliary epithelial cells.

The adhesive interaction between T lymphocytes and parenchymal cells is of importance for many processes of the cellular immune response. This adhesion is regulated by the activation status of the T cell and by cytokines in the microenvironment which can alter adhesion molecule expression by endothelial and epithelial cells. In this study results from an isotopic adhesion assay were compared with those from a flow cytometric assay in order to determine which was most appropriate for the investigation of lymphocyte adhesion to human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) and intrahepatic biliary epithelial cells (HIBEC). Treatment of both these cell types with the proinflammatory cytokines interferon-gamma (IFN-gamma) or tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) significantly upregulated expression of intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1). Treatment with TNF-alpha also induced endothelial cells to express vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1). The isotopic assay demonstrated increased adhesion of lymphoblasts to HUVEC which had been stimulated with cytokines for 15 h but failed to detect major changes in adhesion following 72 h of cytokine treatment of HUVEC or HIBEC. However, the flow cytometric assay reproducibly demonstrated increased adhesion following cytokine treatment for both these time periods; these increases corresponded with the changes in adhesion molecule expression by cytokine-stimulated HUVEC and HIBEC targets. The differences in apparent adhesion measured by the two assays after cytokine stimulation for 72 h may be explained by cytokine-induced changes in the morphology and confluency of cultured cells, Results of the isotopic assay are proportional to the total number of lymphoid cells bound by the cultured target cells and will be distorted by changes in effective target cell area, The flow cytometric assay measures the mean number of lymphoid cells bound by each target cell and is independent of the total binding area, It is concluded that the flow cytometric assay is more suitable than the isotopic technique for following time-dependent changes in the adhesion of leukocytes to cytokine-stimulated target cells.