Rapid qPCR-based quantitative immune cell phenotyping in mouse tissues.

The immune microenvironment plays an important role in the regulation of diseases. The characterization of the cellular composition of immune cell infiltrates in diseases and respective models is a major task in pathogenesis research and diagnostics. For the assessment of immune cell populations in tissues, fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) or immunohistochemistry (IHC) are the two most common techniques presently applied, but they are cost intensive, laborious, and sometimes limited by the availability of suitable antibodies. Complementary rapid qPCR-based approaches exist for the human situation but are lacking for experimental mouse models. Accordingly, we developed a robust, rapid RT-qPCR-based approach to determine and quantify the abundance of prominent immune cell populations such as T cells, helper T (Th) cells, cytotoxic T cells, Th1 cells, B cells, and macrophages in mouse tissues. The results were independently validated by the gold standards IHC and FACS in corresponding tissues and showed high concordance.