THE ROLE OF TMEM150A AS A NOVEL REGULATOR OF CYTOKINE SIGNALING
Jessica Romanet, North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine
Jessica Romanet, Katherine Cupo, Gretchen Scheffe, Jeffrey A. Yoder
Department of Molecular Biomedical Sciences, North Carolina State College of Veterinary Medicine, Raleigh, NC, USA
A healthy immune response must include an inflammatory cascade to recognize, defend against, destroy and remove an insulting source, while mitigating the damaging effects against the host’s tissues from a prolonged and exacerbated immune response. In this process, cytokines, which can be released by numerous cell types, play an important role in recruiting inflammatory cells to sites of infection or injury. Understanding the factors that regulate cytokine release is not only critical to understanding the cellular biology of the immune response, but is also vital for identifying new therapeutic targets for controlling unchecked cytokine production in a wide range of diseases. Unchecked cytokine levels contribute to a wide range of illnesses, including septic shock, cancer growth and metastasis, asthma, reperfusion injury, psoriasis, periodontal disease, and inflammatory bowel disorders. In order to better understand these processes, we have identified TMEM150A, a novel, highly conserved and heretofore functionally undefined gene, as a regulator of cytokine production. Knock-down of TMEM150A expression in epithelial cells resulted in significantly altered levels of cytokine transcripts and secreted cytokine proteins. These observations suggest that TMEM150A plays an important role in regulating cytokine response, and, that it, and the pathway it affects, may provide novel targets for controlling common inflammatory diseases.