Assessing extracellular ATP as danger signal in vivo: The pmeluc system

Abstract

Inflammation is the key pathophysiological response triggered by noxious agents in multicellular organisms. Central to inflammation is detection of exogenous or endogenous danger signals by immune cells. Extracellular ATP is a ubiquitous danger signal released during septic or sterile inflammation. The development of reliable techniques to measure extracellular ATP in vivo has become an urgent need in inflammation studies after the discovery that the most potent plasma membrane receptor responsible for NLRP3 inflammasome activation is an ATP-activated receptor, P2RX7. Here we describe an easy bioluminescence technique for the measurement of extracellular ATP in vivo.