Interleukin-6 is an important mediator for mitochondrial DNA repair after alcoholic liver injury in mice
✍ Scribed by Xiuying Zhang; Shingo Tachibana; Hua Wang; Masayuki Hisada; George Melville Williams; Bin Gao; Zhaoli Sun
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 974 KB
- Volume
- 52
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0270-9139
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
We investigated the hypothesis that a prominent effect of chronic ethanol consumption is mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) injury and compared this injury in IL-6 knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice. Ethanol feeding for 4 weeks resulted in steatosis and oxidative mtDNA damage (8-OHdG) in both IL-6KO and WT mice. However, the WT mice were able to repair the injury by increased production of mtDNA repair enzymes (OGG-1, Neil 1) and check point (p21, p53) proteins and avoid the mtDNA mutations. By contrast the IL-6 KO mice were unable to repair mtDNA resulting in deletions and diminished transcription of the mtDNA encoded protein cytochrome c oxidase subunit-I (COI). The mitochondrial injury was reflected by decreased membrane potential, reduced levels of ATP, and apoptosis-inducing factor (AIF)-induced apoptosis. Conclusion: IL-6 plays a critical role in allowing the liver to recover from significant mtDNA oxidation caused by alcohol. The data suggests that IL-6 activates mtDNA repair enzymes and induces cell cycle arrest allowing time for mtDNA repair.