The extracellular protease plasmin cleaves mouse MCP1 (monocyte chemoattractant protein 1) at lysine 104, releasing a 50-amino acid C-terminal domain. The cleavage event increases the chemotactic activity of MCP1 and, by doing so, promotes the progression of excitotoxic injury in the central nervous system in pathological settings. The mechanism through which the cleavage event enhances MCP1-mediated chemoattraction is unknown; to investigate it, we use wild-type and mutant forms of recombinant MCP1. Full-length MCP1 (FL-MCP1) is secreted by cells as a dimer or multimer. We show that a mutant truncated at the C terminus, K104Stop-MCP1, does not dimerize, revealing that the C terminus mediates the interaction. Microglia, the immune-like cells normally present in the brain, derive from the bone marrow (1-5), enter the central nervous system (CNS) early during development, and reside in the parenchyma in a resting state characterized by ramified morphology. In the healthy brain, they continually extend and retract their processes to sense changes in the surrounding microenvironment (6). However, when there is an injury in the CNS, microglia switch to an activated state characterized by changes in gene expression, morphology, and proliferation (6 -16). The activated microglia then migrate to the site of injury and modify the injury outcome.The migration of microglia to the site of injury is stimulated by the local release of chemokines, a superfamily of structurally related small proteins that function as chemoattractants. A potent chemoattractant for monocytes/microglia (17), MCP1 (monocyte chemoattractant protein-1; also called CCL2), is upregulated in many types of CNS injury, including ischemia, hemorrhage, trauma, infection, hypoxia, and peripheral nerve axotomy (18 -24). The MCP1 protein is highly conserved in the N terminus among different species, whereas the C terminus is much more variable. The rodent MCP1 C terminus is decorated extensively with O-linked carbohydrates (25), which bind both soluble glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) and GAGs immobilized on the cell surface. Soluble GAGs inhibit the binding of MCP1 to its high affinity receptor CCR2 (30), which is expressed by microglia, astrocytes, and microvascular endothelial cells in the brain (26,27). Cell surface GAGs, on the other hand, have been reported to concentrate MCP1 locally, promote MCP1 oligomerization, and thus facilitate the binding of MCP1 to CCR2 (28 -31). Whether MCP1 functions as a monomer or homodimer, however, is still under debate. Although it is believed that MCP1 exerts its function as a homodimer (25,32), it has also been suggested that MCP1 can bind to CCR2 and induce downstream signaling as a monomer (33,34). It should be noted, however, that these experiments were conducted using human MCP1, not rodent MCP1, which contains a heavily glycosylated C-terminal extension.Previous studies in our laboratory have shown that 1) the highly glycosylated C-terminal extension of mouse MCP1 is removed by plasmin, the active protease of plasminogen,...