Fig. 3.

A combination of IL-15 and IL-21 enhances antigen-specific Gzma, Gzmb and Prf1 gene expression in T cells. Murine splenocytes were gp100/A2 TCR-transduced and cultured with IL-2, IL-15, IL-21 or IL-15 + IL-21 as described in legend to Fig. 1. Five days after start of culture, T cells were stimulated with B16gp100/A2 or B16 cells for 20 h. Stimulated T cells were analysed by micro-array for gene expression of Granzyme A (Gzma, a), Granzyme B (Gzmb, b) or Perforin 1 (Prf1, c). See  “Materials and methods” for details about micro-array procedures. Y-axes show relative gene expression for cytokine cultures compared to a common reference. Two independent experiments (starting from T-cell cultures) gave similar results (mean ± SD, n = 3, *p < 0.05 compared to IL-2)