The calpain-calpastatin system in hematopoietic cells.

Calpain I requires low Ca2+ for activation and calpain II requires high Ca2+. It was generally accepted that erythrocytes contain calpain I and calpastatin, but no calpain II. We have recently found, however, that nucleated chicken erythrocytes contain both calpains I and II in addition to calpastatin. The finding is significant in rectifying the previous view that the chicken has only one molecular species of calpain, whereas mammals have two. Another erroneous view which prevailed previously was that polymorphonuclear (PMN) cells contain only one calpain species. We could also recently demonstrate that pig PMN cells do contain both calpains I and II. The cloning of cDNAs for calpastatin enabled us to utilize them as the probes in studying the expression of calpastatin in various hematopoietic cell-line cells. We found that several T cells infected with human retrovirus HTLV-I markedly increased the production of calpastatin, which could be measured both by calpain-inhibition assay and by Western blot analysis, but the level of mRNA for calpastatin did not significantly change when compared with noninfected T cells. The increase in calpastatin protein always parallels with the expression of interleukin 2 receptor protein by the HTLV-I-infected T cells, although the biological implication of such phenomena is almost entirely unknown yet.