A novel mouse model for the investigation of adaptive immune responses upon de novo antigen expression in lung epithelial cells

Upon infection, viral antigen presentation is accompanied with activation of innate immunity which shapes the adaptive immune response and in particular the T cell response. We aimed at developing a mouse model to induce immune mediated lung damage to better understand the mechanisms involved in lung regeneration. For this purpose, we mated SPCCre mice in which the CreERT2 recombinase is expressed in lung alveolar type II epithelial cells (Rock et al., 2011) to RosaOva transgenic mice (Sandhu et al., 2011). In the resulting double transgenic mice Tamoxifen induced Cre recombination results in de novo OVA express…