Regulation of mucin secretion from in vitro cellular models

Conceptually, in vitro models for airway mucin secretion may provide useful information pertinent to many aspects of goblet cell biology/physiology. Such models may be especially useful in identifying potential secretagogues, probing the distribution of receptors between goblet cell apical and basolateral membrane domains, and revealing intracellular messenger pathways underlying receptor activation. We have focused most recently on human bronchial epithelial cell cultures grown as tracheal xenografts and SPOC1 cell cultures. These two models are remarkably similar with respect to the regulation of mucin secretion: luminal challenges with the P2Y2 purinoceptor agonists ATP or UTP elicit mucin secretion with EC50s of about 3 microM and archetypal agonists to other purinoceptors test negative. P2Y2 purinoceptors typically couple via Gq to phospholipase C, suggesting that intracellular Ca2+ and protein kinase C (PKC) are important in activating intracellular pathways leading to goblet cell mucin release. Consistent with this notion, phorbol myristate acetate and ionomycin elicit mucin secretion from SPOC1 cells and HBE xenografts, whereas cyclic nucleotides do not. Delineation of the molecules comprising these receptor/messenger interactions and their supporting pathways remains an important challenge for the development of drugs effective in therapeutic interventions in mucin hypersecretory airway diseases; with these models we have initiated the process.