Housekeeping Gene Expression in the Fetal and Neonatal Murine Thymus Following Coxsackievirus B4 Infection

Abstract

The thymus fulfills the role of T-cell production and differentiation. Studying transcription factors and genes involved in T-cell differentiation and maturation during the fetal and neonatal periods is very important. Nevertheless, no studies to date have been interested in evaluating the expressions of housekeeping genes as internal controls to assess the varying expressions of different genes inside this tissue during that period or in the context of viral infection. Thus, we evaluated by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) the expression of the most common internal control genes in the thymus of Swiss albino mice during the fetal and neonatal period, and following in utero infection with Coxsackievirus B4. The stability of expression of these reference genes in different samples was investigated using the geNorm application. Results demonstrated that the expression stability varied greatly between genes. Oaz1 was found to have the highest stability in different stages of development, as well as following Coxsackievirus B4 infection. The current study clearly demonstrated that Oaz1, with very stable expression levels that outperformed other tested housekeeping genes, could be used as a reference gene in the thymus and thymic epithelial cells during development and following Coxsackievirus B4 infection.