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It is known for more than 25 years that the complement-derived anaphylatoxic peptides, C3a, C4a and C5a are potent activators of basophils and certain types of mast cells. Although tissue distribution of receptors for C3a and C5a well exceeds myeloid cells, apparently they are not expressed on mucosal type mast cells, consequently these cells are not activated by C3a and C5a. Our results do however demonstrate that C3a and peptides related to this complement activation product are able to inhibit FcRI-clustering induced activation of mucosal type mast cells-such as RBL-2H3 cells and bone-marrow derived mast cells. Based on the current results we propose the presence of separate "activator" and "inhibitor" sequence motifs in C3a which are in balance under physiologic conditions.

We selected three kinds of plasmids for expression of C3a as fusion proteins. The proteins were purified by affinity chromatography using the respective specific resins, and their activities were measured by guinea pig platelet aggregation. We showed that polyhistidine (polyHis)-C3a fusion protein was able to exhibit 30% of the activity of natural C3a. However, glutathione S-transferase (GST)-C3a fusion protein exhibited only 10% of such activity, and no activity was measured for maltose binding protein (MBP)-C3a fusion protein. The purified polyHis-C3a fusion protein was attached to the Ni-NTA agarose column in an attempt to isolate the C3a receptor from guinea pig platelets. The C3a binding protein isolated from digitonin-solubilized guinea pig platelet membrane was approximately 50 kDa on SDS-polyacrylamide gel. This is the first report of C3a fusion protein production with biological activity.