Recognition of Intracellular Bacteria by Inflammasomes
Petr Brož
Abstract
The innate immune system comprises different mechanisms that recognize, restrict, and even kill intracellular bacteria. While most of these mechanisms aim at eradicating the infecting pathogen while maintaining cellular integrity, some also result in the concomitant death of the infected cell. The latter mechanism is exemplified by the assembly and activation of inflammasome complexes (1). The term “inflammasome” was coined in the early 2000s to describe multiprotein complexes that are assembled in the cytosol of activated macrophages and that serve as activation platforms for the cysteine protease caspase-1 (2). They are assembled by cytosolic sensor proteins that detect the presence of pathogen- or microbe-derived molecular patterns in the host cell cytosol, endogenous danger signals, or even disturbances of cellular homeostasis, so-called homeostasis-altering processes (1, 3).