As a lymphocyte-specific surface receptor belonging to the cysteine-rich superfamily of scavenger receptors, CD6 acts as a pattern recognition receptor for microbial components and is involved in the regulation of inflammatory responses. However, the characteristics and functions of CD6 molecules in lower vertebrates represented by teleost fish are unknown. In this study, a CD6 homolog (designated OnCD6) was characterized from Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), and establishing its role as a PRRs that participates in immune recognition. OnCD6 contains an open reading frame of 1872 bp that encodes a peptide of 623 amino acids, and contains two conserved SR domain. Multiple sequence alignment revealed that OnCD6 shares a relatively high level of identity with those of other species. Transcriptional expression analysis revealed that OnCD6 was constitutively expressed in immunes tissues such as head kidney and thymus. The expression level of OnCD6 in mainly immune tissues were found significantly upregulated after the injection of Streptococcus agalactiae (S. agalactiae). Moreover, OnCD6 protein was located in the head kidney and brain, mainly over the plasma membrane of lymphocytes in these immune tissues. In vitro experiments showed that CD6 extracellular protein bound to and aggregated several Gram-positive and -negative bacterial strains through the recognition of bacterial surface conserved components LPS and LTA etc. In vivo experiments demonstrated that overexpression OnCD6 before S. agalactiae challenge significantly improved tilapia survival, and this was concomitant with reduced bacterial load and pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β and TNF-α). Taken together, our results illustrated the function of CD6 molecular pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) is conserved and plays an important role in antibacterial infection.
Keywords: CD6; Inflammation; Nile tilapia; PRR; Streptococcus agalactiae.
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