Lipid raft membrane microdomains organize signaling by many prototypical receptors, including the Toll-like receptors (TLRs) of the innate immune system. Raft-localization of proteins is widely thought to be regulated by raft cholesterol levels, but this is largely on the basis of studies that have manipulated cell cholesterol using crude and poorly specific chemical tools, such as β-cyclodextrins. To date, there has been no proteome-scale investigation of whether endogenous regulators of intracellular cholesterol trafficking, such as the ATP binding cassette (ABC)A1 lipid efflux transporter, regulate targeting of proteins to rafts. Abca1(-/-) macrophages have cholesterol-laden rafts that have been reported to contain increased levels of select proteins, including TLR4, the lipopolysaccharide receptor. Here, using quantitative proteomic profiling, we identified 383 proteins in raft isolates from Abca1(+/+) and Abca1(-/-) macrophages. ABCA1 deletion induced wide-ranging changes to the raft proteome. Remarkably, many of these changes were similar to those seen in Abca1(+/+) macrophages after lipopolysaccharide exposure. Stomatin-like protein (SLP)-2, a member of the stomatin-prohibitin-flotillin-HflK/C family of membrane scaffolding proteins, was robustly and specifically increased in Abca1(-/-) rafts. Pursuing SLP-2 function, we found that rafts of SLP-2-silenced macrophages had markedly abnormal composition. SLP-2 silencing did not compromise ABCA1-dependent cholesterol efflux but reduced macrophage responsiveness to multiple TLR ligands. This was associated with reduced raft levels of the TLR co-receptor, CD14, and defective lipopolysaccharide-induced recruitment of the common TLR adaptor, MyD88, to rafts. Taken together, we show that the lipid transporter ABCA1 regulates the protein repertoire of rafts and identify SLP-2 as an ABCA1-dependent regulator of raft composition and of the innate immune response.
© 2015 by The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Inc.