From Differential DNA Methylation in COPD to Mitochondria: Regulation of AHRR Expression Affects Airway Epithelial Response to Cigarette Smoke
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cigarette smoking causes hypomethylation of the gene Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor Repressor (AHRR), which regulates detoxification and oxidative stress-responses. We investigated whether AHRR DNA methylation is related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and studied its function in airway epithelial cells (AECs). The association with COPD was assessed in blood from never and current smokers with/without COPD, and in AECs from ex-smoking non-COPD controls and GOLD stage II-IV COPD patients cultured with/without cigarette smoke extract (CSE). The effect of CRISPR/Cas9-induced AHRR knockout on proliferation, CSE-induced mitochondrial membrane potential and apoptosis/necrosis in human bronchial epithelial 16HBE cells was studied. In blood, DNA methylation of AHRR at cg05575921 and cg21161138 was lower in smoking COPD subjects than smoking controls. In vitro, AHRR DNA methylation at these CpG-sites was lower in COPD-derived than control-derived AECs only upon CSE exposure. Upon AHRR knockout, we found a lower proliferation rate at baseline, stronger CSE-induced decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential, and higher CSE-induced late apoptosis/necroptosis. Together, our results show lower DNA methylation of AHRR upon smoking in COPD patients compared to non-COPD controls. Our data suggest that higher airway epithelial AHRR expression may lead to impaired cigarette smoke-induced mitochondrial dysfunction and apoptosis/necroptosis, potentially promoting unprogrammed/immunogenic cell death.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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".