PhD defence Emilia Laura Bialek

Keywords: Evasin, Chemokines, Signaling, Neutrophils

"Evasins: unraveling the mechanisms of broad-spectrum chemokine inhibitors"

Evasins are a family of anti-inflammatory proteins from tick saliva and one of many key mediators that facilitate tick feeding. They mitigate the host immune response to skin and vascular injury caused by tick attachment to the skin. Evasins do so by binding and inhibiting chemokines, chemotactic cytokines that mediate the migration of host immune cells. Therefore, evasins could be of great value as tools to limit inflammation or characterize crucial chemokines in inflammation. However, the precise mechanism of action of evasins requires further investigation. This project focused on which chemokine functions are affected by evasins, mapping their inhibitory capacity and effectiveness. Moreover, chemokines undergo various post-translational modifications and exist as a heterogenous group with many variants (proteoforms). This project clarified that post-translational modifications affect the activity of some chemokines more than others. Moreover, it was shown that evasins inhibit chemokines proteoforms differently, highlighting the importance of including proteoforms in future research. 

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