Alarmins: Feel the Stress

Alarmins: awaiting a clinical response.

Alarmins are endogenous molecules that are constitutively available and released upon tissue damage and activate the immune system. Current evidence indicates that uncontrolled and excessive release of alarmins contributes to the dysregulated processes seen in many inflammatory and autoimmune conditions, as well as tumorigenesis and cancer spread. Conversely, alarmins have also been found to pl...

Lupus nephritis - alarmins may sound the alarm?

A growing body of literature has documented the elevated levels of the alarmin HMGB1 in lupus skin and serum. Two recent reports highlight the increased expression of HMGB1 in lupus nephritis, within the diseased kidneys or in the urine. Taken together with previous reports, these findings suggest that the interaction of HMGB1 with a variety of receptors, including receptor for advanced glycati...

Alarmins MRP8 and MRP14 induce stress tolerance in phagocytes under sterile inflammatory conditions.

Hyporesponsiveness by phagocytes is a well-known phenomenon in sepsis that is frequently induced by low-dose endotoxin stimulation of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) but can also be found under sterile inflammatory conditions. We now demonstrate that the endogenous alarmins MRP8 and MRP14 induce phagocyte hyporesponsiveness via chromatin modifications in a TLR4-dependent manner that results in enha...

The Feel of Java

Kinetochores feel the pull

S uzuki et al. (1) take a close look at how kinetochores change shape when spindle microtubules tug on them. They fi nd that only part of the kinetochore stretches and identify a protein that might confer this ability. Kinetochores, which hook the fi bers of the mitotic spindle to chromosomes, are more than passive fasteners. Fashioned from more than 100 proteins, the structures are dynamic and...