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Fig. 4 | Immunity & Ageing

Fig. 4

From: Short-term zinc supplementation of zinc-deficient seniors counteracts CREMα - mediated IL-2 suppression

Fig. 4

CREM \(\alpha\) overexpression suppresses IL-2 production. Depicted is the decreasing interleukin-2 (IL-2) production by stimulated peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) obtained from the different groups namely young control (n = 23), ZA elderly (n = 9) and ZD elderly (n = 18) (A), plotted against basal CREM \(\alpha\)/β-actin protein expression (49 XY pairs) (B) and CREM \(\alpha\)/PBGD RNA expression (44 XY pairs) (C). ZD elderly produced significantly less IL-2 after a 48-h period of mitogenic stimulation with 2.5 µg/mL PHA-L than young controls and less IL-2 than their ZA controls, although the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.29). Both CREM \(\alpha\) protein expression (B) and CREM \(\alpha\) RNA expression (C) correlated significantly negatively with the IL-2 production by PBMC. IL-2 levels in the supernatants were quantified by ELISA. Data are shown as means + SD. Significances in (A) were calculated using Kruskal–Wallis and Dunn’s post test. Means not sharing any letter (a or b) are significantly different (p < 0.05). Correlations were determined by the Spearman rank correlation coefficient (r, p < 0.05)

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