Previous Article | Next Article ![]()
Clinical and Diagnostic Laboratory Immunology, March 2004, p. 266-271, Vol. 11, No. 2
1071-412X/04/$08.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/CDLI.11.2.266-271.2004
Copyright © 2004, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Dairy Research Centre STELA, Département des Sciences des Aliments et de Nutrition, Université Laval, Québec, Québec, Canada G1K 7P4,1 Food Immunology Group, Nestec SA, Nestlé Research Center Lausanne, Vers-Chez-les-Blanc, CH-1000 Lausanne 26, Switzerland2
Received 4 September 2003/ Returned for modification 22 October 2003/ Accepted 4 December 2003
| ABSTRACT |
|---|
|
|
|---|
) production in vitro. Hydrolysis of these peptides with L. paracasei peptidases repressed the lymphocyte stimulation, up-regulated IL-10 production, and down-regulated IFN-
and IL-4 secretion. L. paracasei NCC2461 may therefore induce oral tolerance to BLG in vivo by degrading acidic peptides and releasing immunomodulatory peptides stimulating regulatory T cells, which function as major immunosuppressive agents by secreting IL-10. | INTRODUCTION |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Bifidobacteria and lactobacilli are common anaerobes in the human intestinal microbiota (20), and some of them have been reported to display probiotic properties (26). Probiotics are live microorganisms that when ingested may have positive effects on human health (7). Probiotic bacteria, increasingly used as food supplements, especially in infant formulas, have been found to be transiently present in the intestine when administered daily at high doses (6). The beneficial effects of probiotics on the immune system are believed to be numerous (3, 26), but few studies have focused on their role in induction of oral tolerance. Bifidobacterium infantis has been shown to restore oral tolerance to ovalbumin in monoassociated mice (21, 34), and we have recently reported that oral tolerance to ß-lactoglobulin (BLG) was strongly induced and maintained in mice monocolonized with Lactobacillus paracasei NCC2461 (32). The mechanisms by which L. paracasei induces and maintains the oral tolerance response are not yet understood.
It is now recognized that orally administered proteins are subjected to degradation in the gastrointestinal tract by digestive enzymes (pepsin, trypsin, and chymotrypsin) and intestinal bacteria (19). Peptides obtained by tryptic hydrolysis of bovine casein (12, 28) and BLG (27) induce specific oral tolerance in mice. Probiotics colonizing the gut have been shown to contribute to this degradation (31), but it has not yet been proven whether peptides from probiotic degradation induce oral tolerance to the whole proteins. Interestingly, the suppression of lymphocyte proliferation by bovine caseins hydrolyzed by Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG enzymes in vitro has been reported (29, 35), suggesting a potential effect of this strain in the oral tolerance response.
The objective of the present study was to investigate in vitro a mechanism by which L. paracasei NCC2461 may induce and maintain oral tolerance to BLG, namely, the hydrolysis of BLG-derived tryptic-chymotryptic peptides. Suppression of the in vitro lymphocyte proliferation-stimulating action of these peptides as result of hydrolysis by L. paracasei enzymes was evaluated with splenocytes from naïve and BLG-primed mice, and cytokine production was measured.
| MATERIALS AND METHODS |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Preparation of basic and acidic peptide fractions. Acidic and basic peptides were separated from the tryptic-chymotryptic hydrolysate of BLG by ampholyte-free isoelectric focusing by the protocol described by Groleau et al. (9). Briefly, hydrolysate (0.5 g) was rehydrated in 40 ml of deionized water and fractionated for 2 h at 4°C by liquid-phase isoelectric focusing in a preparative Rotofor cell (Bio-Rad Laboratories, Hercules, Calif.) at constant power (15 W). Twenty peptide fractions were collected, and the first 10 were pooled to constitute the acidic fraction (pI from 2 to 5), while the next 10 were pooled to give the basic fraction (pI from 5 to 12). Acidic and basic fractions were freeze-dried and stored at room temperature until use.
Bacterial strain and cell extract preparation. L. paracasei NCC2461 (Nestlé Culture Collection, Lausanne, Switzerland) was isolated from feces of a healthy infant and subcultured twice for 18 h at 37°C under anaerobic conditions in de Man-Rogosa-Sharpe broth supplemented with 0.5 g of L-cysteine/liter. Cell extract was obtained by the method described by Fernandez-Espla et al. (5) with some modifications. Briefly, 3 liters of de Man-Rogosa-Sharpe medium was inoculated with L. paracasei culture (1%, vol/vol) and incubated at 37°C for 15 h without agitation or pH control. Cells were collected by centrifugation at 5,000 x g for 10 min at 4°C and washed three times with 0.01 M potassium phosphate buffer (pH 7). Pellets were then manually ground with alumina beads for at least 30 min at 4°C, and cell walls were discarded by centrifugation (16,000 x g; 1 h; 4°C). The supernatant cell extract was used the same day for hydrolysis. The protein content of the cell extract was measured by the Lowry method (17) with bovine serum albumin as a standard.
Hydrolysis of BLG and peptide fractions with L. paracasei extract. BLG and peptide fractions dissolved at 10% (wt/vol) in water containing 0.01 M CaCl2 were hydrolyzed by L. paracasei extract at 40°C for 1 h without pH control. Prior to addition of the L. paracasei extract, the pH was adjusted to 7.5 with 1 M NaOH (acid fraction) or 1 M HCl (basic fraction). The hydrolysis mixture contained 20 µg of L. paracasei protein per 2,000 µg of substrate. The reaction was terminated by filtration through a 10-kDa-molecular-mass-cutoff Osmotics SEPA membrane (Minnetonka, Minn.) for 3 h at 4°C under constant pressure (120 lb/in2). Permeates were freeze-dried and kept at room temperature until used for in vitro tests. BLG hydrolyzed by L. paracasei extract was freeze-dried without filtration and stored under the same conditions. Peptide fractions not hydrolyzed with L. paracasei extract were also filtered under the same conditions and used as controls.
Characterization of BLG and peptide fractions by size-exclusion chromatography.
BLG and its acidic and basic peptide fractions, before and after hydrolysis with L. paracasei extract, were diluted with acetonitrile-trifluoroacetic acid (30%-0.1%) aqueous buffer to give a final protein concentration of 1% (wt/vol) and filtered on a 0.2-µm-pore-size membrane. The same buffer was used as running buffer. The samples (20 µl) were passed through a TSK-GEL Guard SWXL precolumn (6.0 mm [inside diameter] by 40 mm; Tosoh Biosep LLC) before being separated on a TSK-GEL G2000 SWXL column (7.8 mm [inside diameter] by 300 mm; Tosoh Biosep LLC), with a high-pressure liquid chromatography system (Waters, Milford, Mass.) equipped with two pumps (model 600) running at 0.6 ml/min and a UV-visible-light detector (model 486) set at 214 nm. Molecular weights were determined by comparison to the following standards: BLG,
-lactalbumin, bovine serum albumin, and RNase A (all from Sigma) and egg albumin and chymotrypsinogen A (both from Pharmacia Biotech). Peptides from BLG (positions 142 to 149 and 41 to 60), ß-casein (positions 193 to 202),
-lactalbumin (positions 50 to 53), and casein-
s1 (positions 28 to 34) (all from Service de Synthese de Peptide de l'EST du Québec, Sainte-Foy, Canada) were also used as standards. The total surface area of the chromatograms was integrated and separated into five ranges (>10,000, 5,000 to 10,000, 1,000 to 5,000, 500 to 1,000, and <500 Da), expressed as percentages of the total area of the chromatogram.
Animals. Two groups of BALB/c female mice aged from 4 to 6 weeks were used for lymphocyte proliferation tests. "Naïve" mice fed with a protein-free whey diet (<7 µg of BLG/g of protein) for at least three generations were purchased from Taconic Farms Inc. (Germantown, N.Y.). "BLG-primed" mice from Charles River (Saint-Constant, Quebec, Canada) received a daily diet containing 4 mg of BLG/g of protein. BLG in the diet was measured by the competitive-inhibition enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) described by Pecquet et al. (27).
Proliferation assay. Individual spleens were removed from five naïve and five BLG-primed mice and were pressed separately through cellular sieves. Extracted cells were suspended in 7 ml of RPMI 1640 medium (Gibco) supplemented with 10% fetal calf serum, 2 mM L-glutamine, 100 U of penicillin-100 µg of streptomycin, 10 mM HEPES buffer, and 2 x 10-5 M ß-mercaptoethanol. After centrifugation (135 x g, room temperature, 7 min), erythrocytes were removed from pellets by osmotic shock with 2 ml of 0.87% NH4Cl for 2 min at 37°C. Spleen cells were then washed three times at 4°C with RPMI 1640 medium, and mononuclear cells were counted using a Malassez chamber and 0.4% trypan blue.
BLG and its acidic and basic peptide fractions, before and after hydrolysis with L. paracasei extract, were diluted in supplemented RPMI to 200 and 4,000 µg/ml and microfiltered (0.22-µm pore size). However, BLG hydrolyzed by L. paracasei extract was not filtered after hydrolysis, indicating that 2 and 40 µg, respectively, of L. paracasei extract remained in the two diluted solutions. In contrast, acidic and basic peptide fractions were filtered after L. paracasei hydrolysis to separate peptides from the enzymes. Nevertheless, small amounts of L. paracasei-associated enzymes might pass through the ultrafiltration membrane and hence contaminate peptide fractions. Therefore, L. paracasei extract alone was diluted in supplemented RPMI to 40 and 2 µg of protein/ml, microfiltered, and used as a control for cell proliferation.
Flat-bottomed microtiter plates were loaded with 100 µl of each dilution in duplicate. One hundred microliters of cell suspension (5 x 105 cells/ml) was added to wells, and microplates were incubated at 37°C in a humidified atmosphere of 5% CO2 for 48 h. Wells containing cells suspended in RPMI 1640 medium only were incubated as controls. Lymphocyte proliferation was evaluated by bromodeoxyuridine incorporation for 18 h, and incorporated bromodeoxyuridine was measured by ELISA (Proliferation ELISA kit; Roche Diagnostics, Laval, Canada) according to the manufacturer's instructions. The stimulation index was expressed as the ratio of the optical density in the presence of antigen to that in the absence of antigen (means of duplicates).
IFN-
, IL-10, and IL-4 quantification.
To measure cytokine production by splenocytes, cells were cultured with 10 µg of phytohemagglutinin/ml, at which concentration the stimulation index was not affected. The levels of gamma interferon (IFN-
) and IL-10 in splenocyte culture supernatants were determined by ELISA with commercial kits (Quantikine Murine; R&D Systems, Minneapolis, Minn.). IL-4 was quantified by the sandwich ELISA technique with the monoclonal anti-mouse IL-4 rat immunoglobulin G2b clone 1D11 (1 µg/ml) and biotinylated monoclonal anti-mouse IL-4 rat immunoglobulin G1 clone 24G2 (0.25 µg/ml) as coating and detection antibodies, respectively (Endogen, Woburn, Mass.). Concentrations of IL-4 were extrapolated from standard curves calculated by using dilutions of recombinant mouse IL-4 (Endogen). Optical densities were measured at 450 nm after 15 min of incubation with tetramethylbenzidine and H2O2. Fresh cell-free complete RPMI-10% fetal calf serum medium was used as a negative control. Detection limits of IFN-
, IL-10, and IL-4 were 2, 4, and 4 pg/ml, respectively.
Statistical analysis. The statistical significance was assessed by using the Student t test. A P value of <0.05 was considered significant.
| RESULTS |
|---|
|
|
|---|
|
|
|
and IL-10 were produced by splenocytes in response to BLG and the basic peptide fraction, whether hydrolyzed with L. paracasei extract or not (Fig. 4). The acidic fraction produced a high level of IFN-
and a low level of IL-10, while its L. paracasei-hydrolyzed form did the opposite. Production of IL-4 by the acidic fraction was also conspicuously decreased by L. paracasei hydrolysis. The effect of the L. paracasei-hydrolyzed acidic peptide fraction appears to be due to peptides and not to ultrafilterable residual extract, since no effect on IL-10 production was observed with L. paracasei extract alone.
|
| DISCUSSION |
|---|
|
|
|---|
The proteolytic system of lactic acid bacteria includes essentially two functions: proteases that break down whole protein to peptides and peptidases that degrade peptides. Proteases occur outside the bacterial cell, whereas most peptidases are found in the cytoplasm (15, 16). However, high peptidase activity has been detected at the extracellular level for several bacterial strains, including probiotics (33). The quite similar specificities of intra- and extracellular peptidases (33) have led us to use cytoplasmic peptidases of L. paracasei NCC2461 to degrade native BLG and its peptides even if we hypothesized that L. paracasei hydrolyzes them in vivo with extracellular peptidases. L. paracasei-associated enzymes hydrolyzed mainly acidic peptides, while basic peptides were only slightly degraded and BLG was not at all degraded. Since BLG hydrolysate was shown to be composed mainly of acidic peptides (unpublished data), their hydrolysis by L. paracasei enzymes was of particular interest. The extract activity appeared to be primarily endopeptidasic and di- or tripeptidasic, since an appreciable increase in peptides with molecular masses in the 500- to 1,000-Da range and below 500 Da was observed. Aminopeptidase and dipeptidase activities have been reported for the L. casei group, including L. paracasei, by Shihata and Sha (33). The basic fraction was partially hydrolyzed by L. paracasei peptidases, but peptides with molecular masses higher than 2,000 Da appeared. Interactions between basic peptides and extract-derived components could explain this observation.
Several immunoregulatory peptides from bovine milk proteins have been reported (8). Little is known about the effect of purified BLG and its peptide derivatives on the immune system (41). The hydrolysis of acidic peptides by L. paracasei extract appears to have an attenuated stimulating effect, this being essential for induction of oral tolerance. Well-characterized mechanisms for the induction of oral tolerance include clonal deletion, clonal anergy, and active suppression via the induction of regulatory T cells (25). Type 1-regulatory T (Tr-1) cells have a low proliferation capacity and suppress naïve and memory T helper type 1 (Th1) and Th2 responses due to their ability to produce high levels of immunosuppressive cytokines such as IL-10 (2, 10, 11). IL-10 has been found to down-regulate expression of CD80 and CD86, which function as important costimulatory molecules for T-cell activation (4). Interestingly, IL-10 was found to be up-regulated by L. paracasei-degraded acidic peptides, indicating the potential of these peptides to induce oral tolerance to BLG by a mechanism of active suppression. IL-10 was initially identified as a product of antigen-stimulated murine Th2 cells (24), but in our study, the secretion of IL-10 resulted undoubtedly from the generation of Tr-1 cells, while no induction of IL-4 (Th2-related cytokine) was observed. The potential benefit of L. paracasei-degraded acidic peptides to stimulate oral tolerance response was manifested in BLG-naïve mice especially but also in BLG-primed mice in terms of suppression of lymphocyte proliferation, indicating the capability of hydrolyzed peptides to induce, maintain, and reinforce hyporesponsiveness of T cells. This implies that L. paracasei may aid the induction and maintenance of tolerance to milk proteins in infants and hence prevent later manifestations of allergy symptoms. Induction and maintenance of oral tolerance to BLG have recently been reported in gnotobiotic mice colonized with L. paracasei (32), but further studies of the released bioactive peptides are needed for us to better understand the mechanism of action.
L. paracasei NCC2461 thus seems to stimulate regulatory T cells through its proteolytic activity and liberation of bioactive peptides. Whole cells of the same strain have been found to stimulate regulatory T cells in vitro (37), while we have observed an immunosuppressive effect of its cytoplasmic content at concentrations higher than 80 µg/ml (data not shown). These findings suggest that bacteria such as L. paracasei NCC2461 may induce an immunosuppressive activity either directly via cell-to-cell interactions or indirectly via degradation of antigens or autolytic liberation of cytoplasmic contents. Similar findings have been reported for the cytoplasmic content of Lactobacillus GG (30).
The present study supports earlier findings of immunosuppressive effects of L. paracasei NCC2461 and provides key elements to understanding its mechanism of action in the oral tolerance response. Nevertheless, further investigation is needed to identify the immunosuppressive peptides and understand the molecular mechanisms involved.
| ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |
|---|
We thank Julie Brassard and Mélanie Alain for their deft assistance in the animal house; Vincent Leclerc, Lynda Labarre, Catherine Schwarz, and Christine Martin-Pashoud for their generous technical assistance; and Stephen Davids for critical reading of the manuscript.
| FOOTNOTES |
|---|
| REFERENCES |
|---|
|
|
|---|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. | Clin. Microbiol. Rev. | Infect. Immun. |
|---|---|---|
| J. Clin. Microbiol. | J. Virol. | ALL ASM JOURNALS |