TITLE:
Regulatory role of defensins in inflammatory bowel disease
AUTHORS:
Chi Chen, Praveen Kumar Yadav, Xingpeng Wang, Zhanju Liu
KEYWORDS:
Defensins; Inflammatory Bowel Disease
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Immunology,
Vol.2 No.2,
June
22,
2012
ABSTRACT: Defensins are endogenous antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) produced by professional phago- cytes, Paneth cells, and epithelial cells at mucosal surfaces, which mediate innate immunity through their potent antimicrobial activity in the intestinal tract. In addition, defensins also regulate the function of diverse host immune cells, thereby play an important role in both innate and adaptive immune responses against pathogenic microbes. Abundant evidences have proved that attenuated changes in defensins expression are observed in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Further studies have discovered the concentration of different defensins subgroups has the relationship with various clinical characteristics of IBD and that mucosal surface destruction causes defensins deficiency as a result of in- flammatory damage. This article is to review new current approaches on defensins expression in the intestinal mucosa, particularly in IBD and their potential roles in immune responses in the gut mucosa.