Expression of AFP and Rev-Erb ARev-Erb B and N-CoR in fetal rat liver, liver injury and liver regeneration.docVIP

Comparative Hepatology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Expression of AFP and Rev-Erb A/Rev-Erb B and N-CoR in fetal rat liver, liver injury and liver regeneration Volker Meier, Kyrylo Tron, Danko Batusic, Abderrahim Elmaouhoub and Giuliano Ramadori* Address: University of Goettingen, Department of Internal Medicine, Section of Gastroenterology and Endocrinology, Goettingen, Germany Email: Volker Meier - vmeier1@gwdg.de; Kyrylo Tron - ktron@gwdg.de; Danko Batusic - dbatusi@gwdg.de; Abderrahim Elmaouhoub - maouhou68@yahoo.de; Giuliano Ramadori* - gramado@med.uni-goettingen.de * Corresponding author Published: 05 July 2006 Received: 01 July 2005 Accepted: 05 July 2006 Comparative Hepatology 2006, 5:2 doi:10.1186/1476-5926-5-2 This article is available from: /content/5/1/2 ? 2006 Meier 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: Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) expression can resume in the adult liver under pathophysiological conditions. Orphan nuclear receptors were supposed to regulate AFP gene expression, in vitro. We were interested to study the expression of AFP and orphan nuclear receptors, in vivo. Results: The expression of AFP gene and orphan nuclear receptors in the liver was examined in different rat models: (a) fetal liver (b) liver regeneration [partial hepatectomy (PH) with and without 2-acetyl-aminofluren treatment (2-AAF)], (c) acute liver damage [treatment with CCl4] and (d) acute phase reaction [treatment with turpentine oil]. After PH of 2-AAF treated rats, clusters of AFP positive cells occurred in the periportal region. In the Northern blot analysis, a positive hybridization signal for the full-length AFP-RNA was observ