Expression And Regulation Of Interleukin-6 In Mouse Macrophages By Activin A

IL-6 (interleukin-6, IL-6) is a multifunctional cytokine, which is produced not only in monocytes and macrophages but also in several cell types including most cells of the immune system, skeletal and smooth muscle cells, osteoblast. IL-6 plays a central role in host defence as its functions as a main regulator of the acute phase response. Besides further functions in the immune, nervous and endocrine systems, IL-6 is involved in bone metabolism, hematopoiesis and cancer development.Activin, a member of the TGF-βsuperfamily, plays important roles as a cell proliferation and differentiation factor during the early development of embryos, neurogenesis, hematopoiesis, apoptosis and hormone secretion from new born to adult. Recently more and more evidence indicated that activin relates with inflammation and acute phase reaction closely. Lately investigation indicated that inflammation and tissue injury recovery are participated by Activin. Soon after infection or injury, systemic levels of IL6, IL1, NO elevated to cause acute phase reaction(APR). Activin, which regultes APR, can take part in inflammation as the antagonist of IL-6 or inhibition protein of IL-1 secretion. Activin A can up-regulate or down-regulate the secretion of IL-1 and NO that were observed in the previous research. In this study, the effects of activin A on regulating expression of IL-6 and possible signal transduction mechanism were observed in macrophages.CHO cell line expressing IL-6 stabilly was set, and recombination IL-6 was prepared. The mIL-6 cDNA (639bp) from mice macrophage line RAW264.7 was amplified by RT-PCR, purified and connected with plasmid pMD18-T by TA clone. The positive recombinant plasmid was renamed pMD18-T-mIL-6. It was...