A pain-mediated neural signal induces relapse in murine autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a multiple sclerosis model
- Hokkaido University, Japan
- Tsurumi University, Japan
- University of Freiburg, Germany
- Wakayama Medical University, Japan
- Osaka University, Japan
- National Hospital Organization Toneyama Hospital, Japan
- University of Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
Although pain is a common symptom of various diseases and disorders, its contribution to disease pathogenesis is not well understood. Here we show using murine experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), a model for multiple sclerosis (MS), that pain induces EAE relapse. Mechanistic analysis showed that pain induction activates a sensory-sympathetic signal followed by a chemokine-mediated accumulation of MHC class II+CD11b+ cells that showed antigen-presentation activity at specific ventral vessels in the fifth lumbar cord of EAE-recovered mice. Following this accumulation, various immune cells including pathogenic CD4+ T cells recruited in the spinal cord in a manner dependent on a local chemokine inducer in endothelial cells, resulting in EAE relapse. Our results demonstrate that a pain-mediated neural signal can be transformed into an inflammation reaction at specific vessels to induce disease relapse, thus making this signal a potential therapeutic target.
Article and author information
Author details
Reviewing Editor
- Satyajit Rath, National Institute of Immunology, India
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal experiments were performed following the guidelines of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of the Institute for Genetic Medicine, the Graduate School of Medicine, Hokkaido University and the Graduate School of Frontier Bioscience and Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University with protocol numbers 2014-0083 and 2014-0026.
Version history
- Received: May 14, 2015
- Accepted: July 14, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: July 20, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 11, 2015 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Arima et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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A pain-mediated neural signal induces relapse in murine autoimmune encephalomyelitis, a multiple sclerosis model
eLife 4:e08733.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.08733
Further reading
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CD4+ T cell activation is driven by five-module receptor complexes. The T cell receptor (TCR) is the receptor module that binds composite surfaces of peptide antigens embedded within MHCII molecules (pMHCII). It associates with three signaling modules (CD3γε, CD3δε, and CD3ζζ) to form TCR-CD3 complexes. CD4 is the coreceptor module. It reciprocally associates with TCR-CD3-pMHCII assemblies on the outside of a CD4+ T cells and with the Src kinase, LCK, on the inside. Previously, we reported that the CD4 transmembrane GGXXG and cytoplasmic juxtamembrane (C/F)CV+C motifs found in eutherian (placental mammal) CD4 have constituent residues that evolved under purifying selection (Lee et al., 2022). Expressing mutants of these motifs together in T cell hybridomas increased CD4-LCK association but reduced CD3ζ, ZAP70, and PLCγ1 phosphorylation levels, as well as IL-2 production, in response to agonist pMHCII. Because these mutants preferentially localized CD4-LCK pairs to non-raft membrane fractions, one explanation for our results was that they impaired proximal signaling by sequestering LCK away from TCR-CD3. An alternative hypothesis is that the mutations directly impacted signaling because the motifs normally play an LCK-independent role in signaling. The goal of this study was to discriminate between these possibilities. Using T cell hybridomas, our results indicate that: intracellular CD4-LCK interactions are not necessary for pMHCII-specific signal initiation; the GGXXG and (C/F)CV+C motifs are key determinants of CD4-mediated pMHCII-specific signal amplification; the GGXXG and (C/F)CV+C motifs exert their functions independently of direct CD4-LCK association. These data provide a mechanistic explanation for why residues within these motifs are under purifying selection in jawed vertebrates. The results are also important to consider for biomimetic engineering of synthetic receptors.
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