The death receptor pathway is not involved in alloreactive T-cell induced mitochondrial membrane permeability

Elimination of tumor cells by cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) is mediated by two major pathways: the granule exocytosis and the death receptor pathway, transduced by Fas, TNF and TRAIL. The usage of these distinct pathways in the alloreactive setting across major and minor HLA barriers still remains controversial. We generated CTLs against allogeneic Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-transformed cell lines (LCL) from HLA-unmatched healthy donors and assessed their cytotoxicity by flow cytometrically measuring mitochondrial membrane permeability (MMP) of target cells. Mitochondrial apoptosis induced by CTL was abrogated by selectively inhibiting the granule exocytosis-mediated pathway with Concanamycin A (CMA). Conversely, apoptosis was not decreased in the presence of the caspase 8 inhibitor IETD, which is specific for all death receptor pathways. In general, caspases were not involved in MMP as shown using the pan-caspase inhibitor zVAD. This effector mechanism was preserved when using purified CD4 + and CD8 + T-lymphocyte subsets to generate CTL. We further showed, that death receptor signalling was not used as a salvage mechanism when granule exocytosis was inhibited even at longer incubation times sufficient for slow kinetic death receptor caspase signalling. Our results clearly demonstrate that mitochondrial apoptosis induced by human alloreactive CTLs is mainly mediated by granule exocytosis but not by death receptor caspase dependent pathways. Furthermore, the granule exocytosis pathway does not require caspases to induce MMP.