| 1. |
- Rupprecht, Anne, et al.
(author)
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Quantification of Uncoupling Protein 2 Reveals Its Main Expression in Immune Cells and Selective Up-Regulation during T-Cell Proliferation
- 2012
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In: PLOS ONE. - : Public Library of Science (PLoS). - 1932-6203. ; 7:8
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) is an inner mitochondrial membrane protein. Although the protein was discovered in 1997, its function and even its tissue distribution are still under debate. Here we present a quantitative analysis of mRNA and protein expression in various mice tissues, revealing that UCP2 is mainly expressed in organs and cells associated with the immune system. Although the UCP2 gene is present in the brain, as demonstrated using quantitative RT-PCR, the protein was not detectable in neurons under physiological conditions. Instead, we could detect UCP2 in microglia, which act in the immune defense of the central nervous system. In lymphocytes, activation led to a ten-fold increase of UCP2 protein expression simultaneously to the increase in levels of other mitochondrial proteins, whereas lymphocyte re-stimulation resulted in the selective increase of UCP2. The highest detected level of UCP2 expression in stimulated T-cells (0.54 ng/(mg total cellular protein)) was approximately 200 times lower than the level of UCP1 in brown adipose tissue from room temperature acclimated mice. Both the UCP2 expression pattern and the time course of up-regulation in stimulated T-cells imply UCP2's involvement in the immune response, probably by controlling the metabolism during cell proliferation.
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| 2. |
- Sawcer, Stephen, et al.
(author)
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Genetic risk and a primary role for cell-mediated immune mechanisms in multiple sclerosis
- 2011
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In: Nature. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0028-0836 .- 1476-4687. ; 476:7359, s. 214-219
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Multiple sclerosis is a common disease of the central nervous system in which the interplay between inflammatory and neurodegenerative processes typically results in intermittent neurological disturbance followed by progressive accumulation of disability. Epidemiological studies have shown that genetic factors are primarily responsible for the substantially increased frequency of the disease seen in the relatives of affected individuals, and systematic attempts to identify linkage in multiplex families have confirmed that variation within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) exerts the greatest individual effect on risk. Modestly powered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have enabled more than 20 additional risk loci to be identified and have shown that multiple variants exerting modest individual effects have a key role in disease susceptibility. Most of the genetic architecture underlying susceptibility to the disease remains to be defined and is anticipated to require the analysis of sample sizes that are beyond the numbers currently available to individual research groups. In a collaborative GWAS involving 9,772 cases of European descent collected by 23 research groups working in 15 different countries, we have replicated almost all of the previously suggested associations and identified at least a further 29 novel susceptibility loci. Within the MHC we have refined the identity of the HLA-DRB1 risk alleles and confirmed that variation in the HLA-A gene underlies the independent protective effect attributable to the class I region. Immunologically relevant genes are significantly overrepresented among those mapping close to the identified loci and particularly implicate T-helper-cell differentiation in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis.
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