National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA. kastnerd@exchange.nih.gov
The pyrin domain was first noted in the familial Mediterranean fever protein from which it takes its name. It belongs to a structural superfamily that includes death domains, death effector domains and caspase activation and recruitment domains. Several genes underlying autoinflammatory diseases have at least one of these four death domain−fold motifs. Mutations in CIAS1, encoding cryopyrin, a leukocyte-specific member of this growing superfamily, have now been shown to cause both familial cold autoinflammatory syndrome and Muckle-Wells syndrome. These new findings add to the growing body of evidence that the dysregulation of leukocyte apoptosis may be a common molecular pathway leading to inflammatory disease.
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