The findings presented in this study should also be relevant for researchers using rats to study obesity and/or inflammatory processes such as arteriosclerosis, where the importance of iNKT cells has emerged over the last years [34, 35]. Moreover, our results are also of high relevance in the fields of pharmacology, physiology, and surgery in which the rat is the major Selleckchem MAPK Inhibitor Library model organism and where iNKT cells have been ignored so far. Altogether, we hope that the current study will help and motivate researchers to analyze iNKT cells in the rat model, which shows some promising

similarities to humans, and we anticipate that such studies will greatly enhance our understanding of iNKT-cell biology. F344/DuCrl

and LEW/Crl inbred rats and C57BL/6J/Crl inbred mice originally obtained from Charles River were kept and bred in the animal facilities of the Institute for Virology and Immunobiology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany. The procedures for performing animal experiments as well as animal care were in accordance with the principles of the German law. Permission to keep and breed the animals was given by the city of Würzburg, Germany (OA/he-wa07.12.1987). All animals were maintained under specific pathogen-free selleck conditions and were used at 6–18 weeks of age. Thymocytes and splenocytes were prepared by mechanical disruption using a stainless steel mesh. Erythrocytes were eliminated by lysis with TAC buffer (20 mM Tris, pH 7.2, and 0.82% NH4Cl). Rat and mouse IHLs were isolated as described previously [36]. Rat and mouse CD1d dimers were produced in our laboratory as previously described for mouse CD1d dimer [37, 38]. Modifications such as the use of rat-β-2 microglobulin transduced

J558L cells for rat CD1d-dimer production and construction of the CD1d dimer expression vectors have been performed Carnitine dehydrogenase as described in [36]. The dimers (at a final concentration of 250 ng/μl) were loaded with 40× molar excess of α-GalCer in the presence of 0.05% Triton X-100 for 16 to 24 h at 37°C. As previously shown by Porcelli and colleagues [39], the presence of Triton X-100 was crucial for appropriate loading of α-GalCer into the CD1d molecules. The vehicle used for dilution of α-GalCer was DMSO, thus as control, the dimers were loaded only with the corresponding amount of DMSO. Nonspecific binding of the Ab/dimers to mouse Fc receptors were blocked by incubating the cells first with anti-mouse Fc receptor mAb (2.4G2). CD1d dimer stainings were carried out at room temperature for 30 min with 1 μg of dimers (4 μl) per 100 μl of sample containing up to 106 cells suspended in FACS buffer (PBS pH 7.4, BSA 0.1%, 0.01% NaN3). Bound CD1d dimers were detected with a fluorophore-labeled donkey F(ab′)2 fragment anti-mouse IgG (H+L) with minimal cross-reactivity to rat and other species serum proteins (Dianova), referred hereafter as DαM.