In our histopathological analysis of L2-IL-1β mice housed at MIT under different conditions (SPF and GF), we observed that these mice developed significant (P ≤ 0.0001) esophageal inflammation and cumulative histopathology index scores (HI) even at 3 months of age that was consistently maintained up to 15 months of age (Fig. 1E,F) compared to their WT control littermates (Fig. 2A,B). This evidence concerns the gene IL1B and inflammation.