Figure 12. Radiation induces T cell immune responses in the tumor microenvironment.

Tumors of CMS4-met tumor-bearing mice were irradiated at a dose of 20Gy as shown in Figure 11E. Tumors were excised 8 days after radiation and RNA was isolated from the tumor tissues of untreated control and irradiated mice and analyzed by quantitative PCR for signature genes of T cells (A.), Th1/Tc1 T cells (B.), the STING pathway (C.), T cell chemokines (D.), and TNF cell death pathways (E.). RNA from tumor tissues of three irradiated mice was pooled and RNA from tumor tissues of three untreated mice was pooled and used to prepare cDNA. The expression levels of genes in the control group were arbitrarily set to 1 for each subset of genes. The expression level of genes in the irradiated group is expressed as fold change over the control. *p<0.05, **p<0.01.