Identification of transcripts regulated by ischemic preconditioning in a rat primary cortical cell culture model

Abstract

Short episodes of ischemia followed by reperfusion protect mammalian cells and tissues against a subsequent lethal ischemia and reperfusion. This phenomenon is called ischemic preconditioning. As the development of tolerance depends on protein synthesis, it seems reasonable to speculate that preconditioning of neuronal cells leads to upregulation and translation of protective genes. Therefore, the transcriptional analysis of preconditioned cells should lead to the identification of novel neuroprotective proteins. A very efficient method for the identification of differentially expressed genes is the suppression subtractive hybridization technique. The purpose of this study was to identify uncharacterized transcripts and known genes upregulated in rat primary cortical cultures preconditioned by oxygen glucose deprivation. Although other groups used differential gene expression strategies in the paradigms of global and focal ischemia, this is the first report describing transcriptional differences in the clearly protective paradigm of ischemicpreconditioning.