Polyclonal Antibody to DcR1 (ED2)

Apoptosis is induced by certain cytokines including TNF and Fas ligand in the TNF family through their death domain containing receptors. TRAIL (Apo2L) is a new member of the TNF family and induces apoptosis of a variety of tumor cell lines. DR4 and DR5 are the recently identified functional receptors for TRAIL [1-3]. Two decoy receptors for TRAIL have been identified and designated TRAIL-R3 (DcR1, TRID, LIT) [2-7] and TRAIL-R4 (DcR2, TRUNDD) [8-10]. DcR1 has extracellular TRAIL-binding domain but lacks intracellular signaling domain. It is a glycophospholipid-anchored cell surface protein. DcR1 transcripts are expressed in many normal human tissues but not in most cancer cell lines [2,3]. Overexpression of DcR1 did not induce apoptosis, but attenuated TRAIL-induced apoptosis [2,3].