Inflammasome activation can also involve proteins of the PYHIN family, which contain an N-terminal pyrin domain but lack the LRR domains present in the NLR family. In place of an LRR domain, PYHIN proteins have a HIN (H inversion) domain, so named for the HIN DNA recombinase of Salmonella that mediates DNA inversion between flagellar H antigens. There are four PYHIN proteins in humans, and 13 in mice. In one of these, AIM2 (absent in melanoma 2), the HIN domain recognizes double-stranded DNA genomes and triggers caspase 1 activation through pyrin domain interactions with ASC. AIM2 is located in the cytoplasm and is important for responses in vitro to vaccinia virus, and its in vivo role has been demonstrated by the increased susceptibility of AIM2-deficient mice to infection by Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of tularemia. The related protein IFI16 (interferon inducible protein 16) contains two HIN domains; it is primarily located in the cell nucleus and recognizes viral double-stranded DNA, and will be described below in Section 3-11.
A ‘non-canonical’ inflammasome (caspase 1-independent) pathway uses the protease caspase 11 to detect intracellular LPS. The discovery of this pathway was initially confused as being dependent on caspase 1 because of a specific genetic difference between experimental mouse strains. Caspase 11 is encoded by the murine Casp4 gene and is homologous to human caspases 4 and 5. The mice in which the caspase 1 gene (Casp1) was initially disrupted and studied were originally found to be resistant to lethal shock (see Section 3-20) induced by administration of LPS. This led researchers to conclude that caspase 1 acted in the inflammatory response to LPS. But researchers later discovered that this mouse strain also carried a natural mutation that inactivated the related Casp4 gene. Because the Casp1 and Casp4 genes reside within 2 kilobases of each other on mouse chromosome 9, they failed to segregate independently during subsequent experimental genetic backcrosses to other mouse strains. Thus, mice initially thought to lack only caspase 1 protein in fact lacked both caspase 1 and caspase 11. Later, mice lacking only caspase 1 were generated by expressing functional Casp4 as a transgene; these mice became susceptible to LPS-induced shock. Mice were also generated that lacked only caspase 11, and these were found to be resistant to LPS-induced shock. These results indicated that caspase 11, and not caspase 1 as originally thought, is responsible for LPS-induced shock. Caspase 11 is responsible for inducing pyroptosis, but not for processing of IL-1β or IL-18. It was suspected that TLR-4 was not the sensor for LPS that activated the non-canonical imflammasome, since mice lacking TLR-4 remain susceptible to LPS-induced shock. Recent evidence has suggested that caspase 11 itself is the intracellular LPS sensor, making it an example of a protein that is both a sensor and an effector molecule.