Identification of three inflammatory Caspases in common carp (Cyprinus carpio L.) and its role in immune response against bacterial infection

Inflammatory Caspases are key effectors of the inflammasomes and play an important role in innate immune response. However, there are few studies on the homologs of inflammatory Caspases in bony fish. In the present study, three inflammatory Caspase genes were cloned from common carp and named CcCaspase-A1, CcCaspase-A2 and CcCaspase-B. Nucleotide sequences alignment revealed that the three Caspases were very similar in structure, which contained a PYD domain in the N-terminal, and a CASc domain in the C-terminal. In the phylogenetic tree, CcCaspase-A1 and CcCaspase-A2 were close to the Caspase-A of grass carp, and CcCaspase-B was close to the DrCaspase-B of zebrafish. In healthy common carp, the expression levels of CcCaspase-A1 and CcCaspase-A2 were the highest in the gills, and CcCaspase-B was the highest in the spleen. After immune stimulation with Edwardsiella tarda or Aeromonas hydrophila, the expression levels of all CcCaspases increased significantly. The fluorescence localization assays showed that all these CcCaspases were expressed in the cytoplasm, and were involved in the assembly of CcNLRP1 inflammasome. These results suggest that the inflammatory CcCaspases play a key role in immune response of common carp against bacterial infection, which may enrich the knowledge of inflammasome in fish, and provide basic data for the prevention and treatment of fish infectious diseases.