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Review
. 2020 Oct;108(4):1117-1127.
doi: 10.1002/JLB.3MR0420-573R. Epub 2020 Jun 12.

NLRC4 biology in immunity and inflammation

Affiliations
Review

NLRC4 biology in immunity and inflammation

Warrison A Andrade et al. J Leukoc Biol. 2020 Oct.

Abstract

Inflammasomes are cytosolic multiprotein complexes that sense microbial infections or host cell damage, triggering cytokine production and a proinflammatory form of cell death, called pyroptosis. Whereas pyroptosis and cytokine production may often promote host resistance to infections, uncontrolled inflammasome activation leads to autoinflammatory diseases in humans. Among the multiple inflammasomes described, the neuronal apoptosis inhibitory protein/nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat-containing protein family caspase activation and recruitment domain-containing protein 4 (NLRC4) inflammasome emerged as a critical component for the restriction of bacterial infections. Accordingly, our understanding of this inflammasome advanced remarkably over the last 10 yr, expanding our knowledge about ligand-receptor interaction; cryo-EM structure; and downstream effectors and substrates, such as gasdermin-D, caspase-1, caspase-8, and caspase-7. In this review, we discuss recent advances on the biology of the NLRC4 inflammasome, in terms of structure and activation mechanisms, importance in bacterial and nonbacterial diseases, and the identification of NLRC4 gain-of-function mutations leading to NLRC4-associated autoinflammatory diseases in humans.

Keywords: autoinflammatory diseases; caspase-1; infection; inflammasome; innate immunity.

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References

REFERENCES

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