Association Of The Polymorphisms On Chemokine Gene With Asthma Susceptibility In Northern Chinese Children

Asthma is one of the most common diseases threatening to human health all over the world, and it continues to grow in recent years. As a chronic airway inflammatory disease, the development of asthma is associated with many factors, such as genetic factor, immunity, and environment, among which genetic factor plays more important role.Chemokine is one kind of cytokines, which are responsible for cell transportation and also participate in acute or chronic inflammation reaction and injuries of the lung. Of these chemokine, RANTES is related to the recruitment of eosinophils, lymphocytes and neutrophils; Eotaxin is another chemokine specific to eosinophils; MCP-1 is mainly responsible for the recruitment of monocytes in lung. Genes of chemokine are important candidates for the research of asthma susceptibility, and they have attracted more and more attention from scholars aboard. Studies on the association of gene polymorphism of chemokine and their receptors with asthma and atopy has been reportedCooperating with the National Cancer Institute, our research mainly focuses on the four polymorphism in the promoter regions of RANTES, eotaxin and MCP-1. The polymorphism of chemokine from unrelated 288 children diagnosed with asthma and 53 normal children were identified using PCR/RFLP assay. Our research demonstrated that these polymorphisms also exist in Chinese population, and through the research we have obtained the genetic information of genotypes and allele frequencies at the four sites. Meanwhile, we further investigated two polymorphism sites of RANTES and their effects on the function of the genes. The results are as following:1. -403(G/A) and -28 (C/G) at gene promoter region of RANTES...