This leads to the obvious hypothesis that this signaling axis helps inflammasome activation couple innate-to-adaptive immune coupling by regulating amplitude and duration of cytokine release. Many congrats to Meghan for this 20-page opus! 4/n

Upon ERK1/2 inactivation, the mRNA stability protein TTP becomes dephosphorylated and unstable. This causes mRNA half life to be increased and causes multiple cytokines and chemokines to be released at high level.s 3/n

In this work, Meghan found that inflammasome agonist exposure rapidly caused inactivation of ERK1/2. This inactivation was due to mitochondrial disruption causing activation of the dual specificity phosphatase DUSP6. 2/n