Protein tyrosine nitration has been identified as a biomarker of oxidative stress, and the generation of 3-nitrotyrosine (3-NT) is often accompanied with the increasing of ROS and RNS under pathologic condition [14].
As shown in Fig. 5a, significant amount of 3-NT emerged in cultures following heme/H2O2/NO2 − treatment for 24 h (red staining), indicating the strongest nitrative stress level.
The carbonyl contents (Fig. 4a) and MDA level (Fig. 4c) from heme/H2O2/NO2 −-treated cells were the highest under all conditions.
Whereas at the doses of 3, 4, and 5 μM, heme significantly reduced the viability of cells, which was in agreement with an earlier study [1].
Malondialdehyde (MDA) represents evidence of systemic oxidative stress and inflammation [31], and is commonly used to estimate the level of lipid peroxidation.
The result showed that cell viability loss in a GO dose-dependent manner, and 1.5 mU mL−1 GO induced approximately 15% cell death after 24 h of treatment (Fig. 2b).
Apoptosis has been found to be a major rout for the elimination of cells after a variety of stresses including ROS and RNS [30].
This result suggested that tyrosine residues of BSA may play an important role in heme detoxification.
As illustrated in Fig. 2d, the loss of viability by heme/H2O2 and heme/H2O2/NO2 − was approximately 53 ± 3.8% and 65 ± 4.5%, respectively, which further confirmed that NO2 − dramatically enhances heme/ H2O2 toxicity.This result is well consistent with previous reports [3, 13].
As shown in Fig. 2d, heme/H2O2/ NO2−-induced loss of cell viability was significantly attenuated by BSA or BSA-T pretreatment, and BSA was more effective than BSA-T.
Figure 3a depicts the morphology of SHSY5Y cells after treated with various conditions. Compared with heme/H2O2 treatment, cells exposing to heme/ H2O2/NO2 − exacerbated cell apoptotic and reduced cell yield.
As quantified in Fig. 3c, although heme/H2O2/NO2 − increased the apoptotic rate to 32 ± 6.4%, BSA or BSA-T pretreatment caused a statistically significant reduced apoptotic rate (10 ± 5.0% and 15 ± 6.1%, respectively).
However, pretreatment with 2 μM BSA or BSA-T, we found that both BSA and BSA-T efficiently inhibited heme/H2O2/NO2 −- induced cell apoptotic and increased cell yields.
Monzani et al. [10] also concluded that the heme-SA complex promotes H2O2 activation processes that bear the characteristics of enzymatic reactions and may have biological relevance.
Serum albumin (SA) can act as the heme scavenger by forming heme-SA complex [2, 4–8].
Both BSA and BSA-T attenuated heme/H2O2/NO2 −-induced protein carbonylation and lipid peroxidation.
Of note, incubation with BSA or BSA-T for 24 h decreased heme/ H2O2/NO2 −-derived 3-NT deposits as compared with heme/ H2O2/NO2 − treatment alone, and BSA is more effective on suppressing the formation of 3-NT than BSA-T (Fig. 5b).
Furthermore, the cytoprotective effect of BSA was stronger than that of BSA-T (Fig. 5), suggesting that tyrosine residues of BSA act as oxidation target to prevent other important protein from heme-induced RNS associated damage.
For this reason, it has been considered as a therapeutic tool to counteract heme toxic effects in severe hemolytic diseases, and the usefulness of SA therapy has already been demonstrated in a rat model of acute intracerebral hematoma [2, 9].
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If you find BEL Commons useful in your work, please consider citing: Hoyt, C. T., Domingo-Fernández, D., & Hofmann-Apitius, M. (2018). BEL Commons: an environment for exploration and analysis of networks encoded in Biological Expression Language. Database, 2018(3), 1–11.