Molecular cloning of bovine lymphocyte activation gene-3 and its expression characteristics in bovine leukemia virus-infected cattle

Lymphocyte activation gene-3 (LAG-3), a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II binding CD4 homologue has recently been shown as one of the mechanisms for down-regulating immune responses during chronic disease progression. For the first time, we cloned LAG-3 from two breeds of cattle (Holstein and Japanese Black), and analyzed its expression levels in cattle infected with bovine leukemia virus (BLV), a chronic viral infection that leads to immuno-suppression. The cloned cDNA of bovine LAG-3 have an open reading frame of 1551 nucleotides, encoding a polypeptide of 515 amino acids in length. Similar to the swine LAG-3, the bovine LAG-3 protein sequence consisted of four extracellular domains, a transmembrane domain and an inhibitory motif, KTGELE. We found that the bovine LAG-3 mRNA transcripts were expressed predominantly on T-cells such as CD4+ and CD8+ cells, among peripheral blood mononuclear cells. In subsequent expression analysis, LAG-3 mRNA expression on CD4+ T-cells from BLV-infected cattle was upregulated compared to that in normal cattle. Comparable results were obtained with CD8+ T-cells from cattle infected with BLV. We further observed strong upregualtion of MHC class II molecule, the ligand for LAG-3 in BLV-infected cattle. These findings indicate an important role for inhibitory receptor molecules such as LAG-3 in chronic bovine infections and future studies will elucidate the specific role of LAG-3 in bovine diseases.