Oral Presentation Lorne Infection and Immunity 2019

Post-translational Regulation of Inflammasome-associated IL-1β (#24)

Swarna Lekha Vijayaraj 1 , Rebecca Feltham 1 , Maryam Rashidi 1 , Laura Dagley 1 , Andrew Kueh 1 , Marco Herold 1 , Andrew Webb 1 , Kate Lawlor 2 , James Vince 1
  1. Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, VIC, Australia
  2. Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Clayton, VIC, Australia

Cytosolic inflammasome protein complexes sense pathogen and sterile danger molecules to activate and induce the secretion of the potent proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-1β (IL-1β). The importance of IL-1β is underscored by clinical trials implicating its excessive activation in hereditary autoinflammatory syndromes, and common conditions such as gout, cancer and cardiovascular disease. However, there remains a fundamental knowledge gap in our understanding of how IL-1β regulated. Here we have used mass-spectrometry to investigate the post-translational regulation of IL-1β. We found that IL-1β is both phosphorylated and ubiquitylated on conserved target residues. Mutation of a single conserved IL-1β ubiquitylation site by CRISPR gene editing revealed how the ubiquitylation of IL-1β regulates its activation by inflammasome protein complexes, both in vitro and in inflammatory disease models in vivo. Moreover, we observed that distinct innate immune stimuli trigger IL-1β ubiquitylation to impact its signalling. Therefore, the post-translational ubiquitylation of IL-1β is likely to influence inflammatory disease pathogenesis.