healthy livers. A new discovery could help patients with liver cirrhosis (bottom) restore their liver health (top).
Scientists have developed transgenic mice that do not receive the healing of the deadly liver known as cirrhosis - even if exposed to environmental toxins or Swill equivalent gallon whiskey a day. Research shows a possible way to prevent cirrhosis, and also reveals that some proteins, thought to be specialists, may have more than one trick up their sleeves.
When the liver is injured by infection or toxins like alcohol, it repairs the damage by activating the liver cells, muscle smooth. chronic damage leads to excessive repair cells clog blood vessels. Eventually, the liver begins to starve. What starts the repair process is a molecular chain reaction set off by messenger proteins, which eventually activates a protein called C / EBPB.
Medical scientists Martina Buck and Mario Chojkier at the University of California, San Diego, wanted to know what C / EBPB done and how it is powered. Using radioactive tracers, they found that a phosphor molecule must attach to a certain place. Other biochemical studies revealed that C / EBPB usually keeps repair liver in check by caspase activation proteins called. But when the fastener phosphorus, caspases are inhibited instead. smooth liver cells accumulate, and the result is cirrhosis.
To see if this discovery could help prevent liver disease, high researchers transgenic mice with the version of C / EBPB that could not bind phosphorus. Even when exposed to a dangerous toxin, the mice do not develop cirrhosis; control animals, meanwhile, quickly fell ill. The researchers, who report their work in the October 26 issue of Molecular Cell, soon hope to create a modified version of the protein that works in humans.
The results were "remarkable," said biochemist Steven McKnight, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, because they show that C / EBPB, previously known only to regulate transcription of DNA, regulates also the activity of other proteins. - two tasks thought to be independent and unrelated until recently the discovery of proteins with different functions, he said, calls into question the basic principle that proteins have evolved each attack a single specialized task.
Related Sites
Liver disease Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital home page
American Association for the study of diseases liver
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