The Interleukin-1 family (IL-1 family) is a group of 11 cytokines, which plays a central role in the regulation of immune and inflammatory responses to infections or sterile insults.

Discovery of these cytokines began with studies on the pathogenesis of fever. The studies were performed by Menkin and Beeson in 1943-1948 on the fever-producing properties of proteins released from rabbit peritoneal exudate cells. These studies were followed by contributions of several investigators, who were primarily interested in the link between fever and infection/inflammation. The basis for the term "interleukin" was to streamline the growing number of biological properties attributed to soluble factors from macrophages and lymphocytes. IL-1 was the name given to the macrophage product, whereas IL-2 was used to define the lymphocyte product. At the time of the assignment of these names, there was no amino acid sequence analysis known and the terms were used to define biological properties.

In 1985 two distinct, but distantly related complementary DNAs encoding proteins sharing human IL-1 activity were reported to be isolated from a macrophage cDNA library, thus defining two individual members of the IL-1 family – IL-1α and IL-1β.

IL-1 family is a group of 11 cytokines, which induces a complex network of proinflammatory cytokines and via expression of integrins on leukocytes and endothelial cells, regulates and initiates inflammatory responses.

IL-1α and IL-1β are the most studied members, because they were discovered first and because they possess strongly proinflammatory effect. They have a natural antagonist IL-1Ra (IL-1 receptor antagonist). All three of them include a beta trefoil fold and bind IL-1 receptor (IL-1R) and activate signaling via MyD88 adaptor, which is described in the Signaling section of this page. IL-1Ra regulates IL-1α and IL-1β proinflammatory activity by competing with them for binding sites of the receptor.

All of the members of IL-1 family, except IL-1Ra, are first synthesized as a precursor protein, which means it is synthesized as a long form of a protein which has to be proteolytically cleaved to a shorter, active molecule, which is generally called a mature protein. IL-1 family precursors do not have a clear signal peptide for processing and secretion and none of them are found in the Golgi; they belong to so-called leaderless secretory protein group. The similar feature of IL-1α and IL-33 is that their precursor forms can bind to their respective receptor and can activate signal transduction. But this is not a common feature for all IL-1 family members, since IL-1β and IL-18 precursor forms do not bind their receptors and require proteolytic cleavage by either intracellular caspase-1 or extracellular neutrophilic proteases.

...
Wikipedia