Ficolins are important and widely distributed pattern recognition molecules that can induce lectin complement pathway activation and initiate the innate immune response. Although
ficolins can bind
lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in vitro, the sources, dynamic changes and roles of local
ficolins in LPS-induced
pulmonary inflammation and injury remain poorly understood. In this study, we established a ficolin knockout mouse model by clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/
CRISPR-associated protein 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) technology, and used flow cytometry and
hematoxylin and
eosin staining to study the expressions and roles of local
ficolins in LPS-induced
pulmonary inflammation and injury. Our results show that besides ficolin B (FcnB),
ficolin A (FcnA) is also expressed in leukocytes from the bone marrow, peripheral blood, lung and spleen. Further analyses showed that macrophages and neutrophils are the main sources of FcnA and FcnB, and T and B cells also express a small amount of FcnB. The
intranasal administration of LPS induced local
pulmonary inflammation with the increased recruitment of macrophages and neutrophils. LPS stimulation induced increased expression of FcnA and FcnB in neutrophils at the acute stage and in macrophages at the late stage. The severity of the
lung injury and local
inflammation of Fcna-/- mice was increased by the induction of extracellular complement activation. The recovery of LPS-induced local
lung inflammation and injury was delayed in Fcnb-/- mice. Hence, these findings suggested that the local macrophage- and neutrophil-derived FcnA protects against LPS-induced
acute lung injury by mediating extracellular complement activation.