Abstract
Chemokines are a family of small cytokines, also called chemotactic cytokines. Chemokines have the ability to induce chemotaxis for immune cells. CCL5 (also known as RANTES) is an important chemokine that demonstrates a feature to induce leukocytes adhesion and transmigration in the site of inflammation. CCL5 plays an important role in many proinflammatory diseases. Most of the trials of CCL5 uses mouse as the model to conduct clinical or cell tests. Thus, we aim to understand if mouse CCL5 (mCCL5) is suitable to mimic human CCL5 (hCCL5) in the mouse model. mCCL5 contains sequence similar to hCCL5. However, there is no information related to mCCL5 structure, even no structural comparison between the two chemokines. Therefore, we established the comparison between the two cross-species CCL5s. Firstly, using E. coli as the expression system, we established an improved method for mCCL5 preparation. Subsequently, we determined structural property of mCCL5 and compared to hCCL5. By using NMR method, human and mouse CCL5 share similar secondary structural elements and meanwhile, oligomerization behavior that the residue E66 involved in hCCL5 self-aggregation also involved in mCCL5 aggregation. Thus, this research confirms mCCL5 and mouse model can be a good system for testing drug candidates in prior of human trials. The established method also benefits for rodent CCL5 production in the future.