Autophagy plays a protective role in free cholesterol overload-induced death of smooth muscle cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Smooth muscle cells (SMC) make up most of the vascular system. In advanced atherosclerotic plaques, dying SMCs undergo a complex death mode. In the present study, we examined the activation of autophagy in SMCs overloaded with excess free cholesterol (FC) and investigated the possible role which autophagy plays during the FC-induced cell death. After incubation with excess FC, a robust expression of autophagic vacuoles (AV) was detected using both fluorescence microscopy and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results revealed that FC induced a time-dependent upregulation of microtubule-associated protein-1 light chain 3-II (LC3-II). Inhibition of autophagy by 3-methyladenine (3-MA) enhanced both cell apoptosis and necrosis, while on the contrary, rapamycin inhibited cell death following cholesterol application. Furthermore, the impact of the colocalization of fragmented mitochondria with AVs was observed after cholesterol treatment. Our results also revealed that the modulation of autophagy directly influenced the cellular organellar stress. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated that excess FC induced the activation of autophagy in SMCs as a cellular defense mechanism, possibly through the degradation of dysfunctional organelles such as mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".