Inhibition of Caspase-Mediated Apoptosis by Peroxynitrite in Traumatic Brain Injury
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In traumatic brain injury (TBI), neurons surviving the primary insult may succumb through poorly understood secondary mechanisms. In vitro, cortical neurons exposed to stretch injury exhibited enhanced vulnerability to NMDA, apoptotic-like DNA fragmentation, peroxynitrite (PN) formation, and cytoplasmic cytochrome c accumulation. Surprisingly, caspase-3 activity was undetectable by both immunoblotting and fluorogenic activity assays. Therefore, we hypothesized that PN directly inhibits caspases in these neurons. Consistent with this, stretch injury in cultured neurons elicited tyrosine nitration of procaspase-3, but not caspase-9 or Apaf-1, suggesting a direct interaction of PN with caspase-3. In an ex vivo system, PN inhibited the activity of caspase-3, and this inhibition was reversible with the addition of the sulfhydryl reducing agent dithiothreitol, indicating that PN inhibits caspases by cysteinyl oxidation. Moreover, in cultures, the PN donor 3-morpholinosydnonimine (SIN-1) blocked staurosporine-induced caspase-3 activation and its downstream effects including PARP-1 [poly-(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1] cleavage and phosphotidylserine inversion, suggesting that peroxynitrite can inhibit caspase-3-mediated apoptosis. To examine these mechanisms in vivo, rats were exposed to a lateral fluid percussion injury (FPI). FPI caused increased neuronal protein nitration that colocalized with TUNEL staining, indicating that PN was associated with neurodegeneration. Caspase-3 activity was inhibited in brain lysates harvested after FPI and was restored by adding dithiothreitol. Our data show that caspase-mediated apoptosis is inhibited in neurons subjected to stretch in vitro and to TBI in vivo, mostly because of cysteinyl oxidation of caspase-3 by PN. However, this is insufficient to prevent cell death, indicating that the TBI therapy may, at a minimum, require a combination of both anti-apoptotic and anti-oxidant strategies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".