Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kaplan, Amber
• Lee, Michelle W
• Wolf, Andrea J
• Limon, Jose J
• Becker, Courtney A
• Ding, Minna
• Murali, Ramachandran
• Lee, Ernest Y
• Liu, George Y
• Wong, Gerard C L
• Underhill, David M

Titel

Direct Antimicrobial Activity of IFN-β

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of immunology (1950), 2017-05, Vol.198 (10), p.4036-4045

Ort / Verlag

United States: American Association of Immunologists

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Type I IFNs are a cytokine family essential for antiviral defense. More recently, type I IFNs were shown to be important during bacterial infections. In this article, we show that, in addition to known cytokine functions, IFN-β is antimicrobial. Parts of the IFN-β molecular surface (especially helix 4) are cationic and amphipathic, both classic characteristics of antimicrobial peptides, and we observed that IFN-β can directly kill Further, a mutant that is more sensitive to antimicrobial peptides was killed more efficiently by IFN-β than was the wild-type , and immunoblotting showed that IFN-β interacts with the bacterial cell surface. To determine whether specific parts of IFN-β are antimicrobial, we synthesized IFN-β helix 4 and found that it is sufficient to permeate model prokaryotic membranes using synchrotron x-ray diffraction and that it is sufficient to kill These results suggest that, in addition to its well-known signaling activity, IFN-β may be directly antimicrobial and be part of a growing family of cytokines and chemokines, called kinocidins, that also have antimicrobial properties.