Patients who develop inflammatory polyarthritis (IP) after immunization are clinically indistinguishable from other patients with IP

Musculoskeletal symptoms may occur following various types of immunization, and it has also been suggested that, like infection, immunization may act as a trigger for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). A total of 48 of 898 (5.3%) patients with early inflammatory polyarthritis (IP) referred to the Norfolk Arthritis Register reported an immunization in the 6 weeks prior to symptom onset. There were no important clinical or demographic differences between the 48 immunized patients and 185 consecutive patients who did not report prior immunization. In addition, the frequencies of HLA-DRB1*01. *04 and the shared epitope in 33 of the immunized patients were similar to those in the 185 non-immunized patients and to those in 136 healthy controls. Further results from a case-control study suggest that the rate of immunization is higher amongst cases (5.5%) than age- and sex-matched controls (2.8%). In a small number of susceptible individuals, immunization may thus act as a trigger for RA.      

Effect of natural killer cells on syngeneic bone marrow: in vitro and in vivo studies demonstrating graft failure due to NK cells in an identical twin treated by bone marrow transplantation

Bone marrow transplantation for severe idiopathic aplastic anemia was undertaken in a patient, using his monozygotic twin brother as the donor. In spite of the use of syngeneic bone marrow, failure of engraftment occurred on two occasions. In vitro studies demonstrated that natural killer (NK) cells from the recipient markedly inhibited the growth of donor bone marrow granulocyte progenitor cells. On a third attempt, successful bone marrow engraftment was achieved following high-dose cyclophosphamide, which has previously been shown to be inhibitory to NK cells. We conclude that NK cell activity may play an important role in bone marrow failure as well as being responsible for at least some cases of aplastic anemia.     

Roussel award for cardiology. The mechanism of nucleotide induced calcium translocation across sarcoplasmic reticulum membranes: evidence for a non-translocated intermediate pool of calcium

Our previous data suggested that, in cardiac muscle sarcoplasmic reticulum fragments, GTP hydrolysis occurs by an alternative enzyme cycle of the Ca2+ ATPase which is insensitive to (Ca2+) and does not involve an acyl phosphate intermediate. Despite this, GTP induces the incorporation of calcium into a membrane pool that is not translocated to the vesicular lumen. The present study suggests that this GTP-induced intermediate calcium pool is identical to a modulable component of the calcium translocation process in that: it has an identical pH sensitivity; the initial incorporation of calcium in response to GTP eliminates the initial rapid burst and lag component of the typical ATP-induced calcium uptake curve when ATP is added during GTP-induced calcium accumulation. Instead, the addition of ATP during GTP-induced calcium accumulation results in the prompt onset of the linear phase of calcium translocation; GTP-induced calcium accumulation directly affects the pH sensitivity of subsequent ATP-induced calcium accumulation. We suggest that the intermediate calcium pool is in series with calcium translocation and is the site of the pH sensitivity observed in calcium flux.     

Glutaredoxin function for the carboxyl-terminal domain of the plant-type 5′-adenylylsulfate reductase

5′-Adenylylsulfate (APS) reductase (EC 1.8.99.-) catalyzes the reduction of activated sulfate to sulfite in plants. The evidence presented here shows that a domain of the enzyme is a glutathione (GSH)-dependent reductase that functions similarly to the redox cofactor glutaredoxin. The APR1 cDNA encoding APS reductase from Arabidopsis thaliana is able to complement the cysteine auxotrophy of an Escherichia coli cysH [3′-phosphoadenosine-5′-phosphosulfate (PAPS) reductase] mutant, only if the E. coli strain produces glutathione. The purified recombinant enzyme (APR1p) can use GSH efficiently as a hydrogen donor in vitro, showing a K_m[GSH] of ≈0.6 mM. Gene dissection was used to express separately the regions of APR1p from amino acids 73–327 (the R domain), homologous with microbial PAPS reductase, and from amino acids 328–465 (the C domain), homologous with thioredoxin. The R and C domains alone are inactive in APS reduction, but the activity is partially restored by mixing the two domains. The C domain shows a number of activities that are typical of E. coli glutaredoxin rather than thioredoxin. Both the C domain and APR1p are highly active in GSH-dependent reduction of hydroxyethyldisulfide, cystine, and dehydroascorbate, showing a K_m[GSH] in these assays of ≈1 mM. The R domain does not show these activities. The C domain is active in GSH-dependent reduction of insulin disulfides and ribonucleotide reductase, whereas APR1p and R domain are inactive. The C domain can substitute for glutaredoxin in vivo as demonstrated by complementation of an E. coli mutant, underscoring the functional similarity between the two enzymes.     

Leukemia inhibitory factor upregulates cytokine expression by a murine stromal cell line enabling the maintenance of highly enriched competitive repopulating stem cells

Attempts to maintain or expand primitive hematopoietic stem cells in vitro without the concomitant loss of their differentiative and proliferative potential in vivo have largely been unsuccessful. To investigate this problem, we compared the ability of three cloned bone marrow (BM) stromal cell lines to support the growth of primitive Thy- 1lo Sca-1+H-2Khi cells isolated by fluorescence-activated cell sorting from the BM of Ly-5.2 mice treated 1 day previously with 5-fluo- rouracil. Sorted cells were highly enriched in cobblestone area-forming cells (CAFC), but their frequency was dependent on the stromal cell lines used in this assay (1 per 45 cells on SyS-1; 1 per 97 cells on PA6). In the presence of recombinant leukemia inhibitory factor (LIF), CAFC cloning efficiency was increased to 1 per 8 cells on SyS-1 and 1 per 11 cells on PA6, thus showing the high clonogenicity of this primitive stem cell population. More primitive stem cells with competitive repopulating potential were measured by injecting the sorted cells into lethally irradiated Ly-5.1 mice together with 10(5) radioprotective Ly-5.1 BM cells whose long-term repopulating ability has been "compromised" by two previous cycles of marrow transplantation and regeneration. Donor-derived lymphocytes and granulocytes were detected in 66% of animals injected with 50 sorted cells. To quantitate the maintenance of competitive repopulating units (CRU) by stromal cells, sorted cells were transplanted at limiting dilution before and after being cultured for 2 weeks on adherent layers of SyS-1, PA6, or S17 cells. CRU represented 1 per 55 freshly sorted cells. CRU could be recovered from cocultures supported by all three stromal cell lines, but their numbers were approximately-sevenfold less than on day 0. In contrast, the addition of LIF to stromal cultures improved CRU survival by 2.5-fold on S17 and PA6 cells (approximately two-fold to threefold decline), and enabled their maintenance on SyS-1. LIF appeared to act indirectly, because alone it did not support the proliferation of Thy- 1lo Sca-1+H-2Khi cells in stroma-free cultures. Polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis revealed that Interleukin-1beta (IL-1 beta) IL-2, IL-6, granulocyte-colony stimulating factor, granulocyte macrophage-colony stimulating factor, transforming growth factors, LIF, and Steel Factor (SLF) mRNAs were upregulated in SyS-1 within 1 to 6 hours of LIF-stimulation. To determine if increased expression of SLF by LIF-stimulated SyS-1 cells could account for their capacity to support stem cells, sorted calls were cocultured on simian CV-E cells that were transfected with an expression vector encoding membrane-bound SLF, or supplemented with soluble SLF. In both cases, SLF synergized with IL-6 produced endogenously by CV-E cells enabling CAFC growth equivalent to that on LIF-stimulated SyS-1. CAFC development on LIF- stimulated SyS-1 could also be completely abrogated by an anti-SLF antibody. These data provide evidence for a role of LIF in the support of long-term repopulating stem cells by indirectly promoting cytokine expression by BM stroma. Furthermore, we have used quantitative assays to show a maintenance of CRU numbers, with retention of in vivo function following ex vivo culture.     

Tight and specific lanthanide binding in a de novo TIM barrel with a large internal cavity designed by symmetric domain fusion

De novo protein design has succeeded in generating a large variety of globular proteins, but the construction of protein scaffolds with cavities that could accommodate large signaling molecules, cofactors, and substrates remains an outstanding challenge. The long, often flexible loops that form such cavities in many natural proteins are difficult to precisely program and thus challenging for computational protein design. Here we describe an alternative approach to this problem. We fused two stable proteins with C2 symmetry—a de novo designed dimeric ferredoxin fold and a de novo designed TIM barrel—such that their symmetry axes are aligned to create scaffolds with large cavities that can serve as binding pockets or enzymatic reaction chambers. The crystal structures of two such designs confirm the presence of a 420 cubic Ångström chamber defined by the top of the designed TIM barrel and the bottom of the ferredoxin dimer. We functionalized the scaffold by installing a metal-binding site consisting of four glutamate residues close to the symmetry axis. The protein binds lanthanide ions with very high affinity as demonstrated by tryptophan-enhanced terbium luminescence. This approach can be extended to other metals and cofactors, making this scaffold a modular platform for the design of binding proteins and biocatalysts.

The TIM barrel fold is among the most versatile enzyme scaffolds in nature (1, 2). It consists of eight parallel β-strands surrounded by eight α-helices in a (β/α)₈ topology. The parallel β-strands confer a polarity to the domain—a “top” and “bottom.” Enzyme active sites in nature are usually located at the center of the top (3), where side chains from all eight strands are directed toward the center of the barrel. Additional substrate-binding components are typically formed from irregular, extended loops that connect the strands and helices (4). Below the active site, an extensive hydrophobic core between the β-barrel and the α-helices provides considerable stability, allowing TIM barrel active sites to diversify with minimal effects on overall fold stability (5).The engineering of natural TIM barrels, both by directed evolution and design, has resulted in enzymes with altered substrate specificities, enhanced reaction rates, and even new-to-nature chemistries (6–13). The de novo design of catalytic functions, however, has been challenged in part by the difficulty in programming flexible loops; the most successful approaches to date have reused loops found in nature (14, 15). An artificial TIM barrel designed with atomic-level accuracy was created previously using the Rosetta macromolecular and design platform (16, 17). This protein (sTIM11), which has no native function and no natural sequence homologs, was created by repeating four copies of a 46-amino acid (β/α)₂ unit about a central symmetry axis. It was expressed as a single chain, but the internal symmetry left open the possibility of converting the barrel into a homotetramer or homodimer by expressing one or two 46-residue repeats, then allowing these parts to self-assemble in solution to form a complete TIM barrel. More recently, this scaffold has been reengineered to improve thermodynamic and kinetic stability, yielding a series of improved variants dubbed DeNovoTIMs (18). De novo protein design is inspired by but not limited to nature’s solutions. To generate a protein scaffold that might support the incorporation of catalytic cofactors, we aimed for an alternative to loop design: fusing ordered protein domains directly on top of a DeNovoTIM variant.Many natural proteins require a metal ion to carry out their function. Such metalloproteins are involved in numerous biological processes, including metal ion storage and transport, sensing and signaling, electron transfer pathways, and catalysis. Computationally designed proteins may serve as a starting point to engineer artificial metalloproteins with specific binding sites for a metal ion of choice. Thus, in addition to engineering a suitable lid atop DeNovoTIM, we set out to introduce a de novo metal-binding site for large, trivalent lanthanide cations, which possess unique electronic and photophysical properties (19). The f-block elements exhibit long-lived luminescence, which can be enhanced through energy transfer from a close-by antenna molecule, an approach that is exploited in so-called lanthanide-binding tags (20, 21). De novo designed peptides were shown previously to form lanthanide-binding coiled coils with potential applications as paramagnetic MRI contrast agents (22, 23). Their strong Lewis acidity also makes lanthanides powerful catalysts for various synthetically useful reactions (24), although their biological relevance was only recently discovered, when lanthanide-dependent methanol dehydrogenases were isolated from certain methylotrophic and methanotrophic bacteria (25, 26). Here, we introduce a de novo lanthanide-binding protein with ultra-high affinity, which provides a starting point for the future engineering of lanthanide-dependent biotechnological tools and artificial enzymes.