A new mechanism regulating the initiation of allergic airway inflammation.

Background: The earliest immune events induced by allergens are poorly understood, yet are likely essential to understanding how allergic inflammation is established.

Objective: We sought to describe the earliest signaling events activated by allergen and determine their significance to allergic inflammation.

Methods: A fungal-associated allergenic proteinase (FAP) or ovalbumin was administered once intranasally to wild-type mice to determine their ability to induce allergy-associated genes and initiate allergic lung inflammation.

A general method for bead-enhanced quantitation by flow cytometry.

Flow cytometry provides accurate relative cellular quantitation (percent abundance) of cells from diverse samples, but technical limitations of most flow cytometers preclude accurate absolute quantitation. Several quantitation standards are now commercially available which, when added to samples, permit absolute quantitation of CD4+ T cells. However, these reagents are limited by their cost, technical complexity, requirement for additional software and/or limited applicability.