Effects of heparin on the uptake of lipoprotein lipase in rat liver.docVIP

BMC Physiology BioMedCentral Research article Open Access Effects of heparin on the uptake of lipoprotein lipase in rat liver Lucyna Neuger1, Senén Vilaró2, Carmen Lopez-Iglesias3, Jitendra Gupta4, Thomas Olivecrona4 and Gunilla Olivecrona*4 Address: 1Department of Surgical and Perioperative Sciences, Clinical Physiology, Ume? University, Ume?, Sweden, 2Department of Cell Biology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, 3Scientific and Technical Services, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain and 4Department of Medical Biosciences, Physiological Chemistry, Ume? University, Ume?, Sweden Email: Lucyna Neuger - lucyna.neuger@clinphys.umu.se; Senén Vilaró - senen@porthos.bio.ub.es; Carmen Lopez- Iglesias - carmenli@giga.sct.ub.es; Jitendra Gupta - jitendra.gupta@medbio.umu.se; Thomas Olivecrona - thomas.olivecrona@medbio.umu.se; Gunilla Olivecrona* - gunilla.olivecrona@medbio.umu.se * Corresponding author Published: 15 November 2004 Received: 11 March 2004 Accepted: 15 November 2004 BMC Physiology 2004, 4:13 doi:10.1186/1472-6793-4-13 This article is available from: /1472-6793/4/13 ? 2004 Neuger et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Lipoprotein lipase (LPL) is anchored at the vascular endothelium through interaction with heparan sulfate. It is not known how this enzyme is turned over but it has been suggested that it is slowly released into blood and then taken up and degraded in the liver. Heparin releases the enzyme into the circulating blood. Several lines of evidence indicate that this leads to accelerated flux of LPL to the liver and a temporary depletion of the enzyme in peripheral tissues. Results: Rat livers were found to contain substantial a