NCTD-induced autophagy and mitophagy
LC3 is considered to be the initiation factor of autophagy-specific markers. Our research shows that, after tumor cells are exposed to NCTD, LC3I transforms to LC3II, and the expression level of SQSTM1 / P62p62 decreases. As shown in Figure 5A. This is the same as we observed the aggregation of LC3 under a confocal microscope. The accumulation of punctate LC3 in the cytoplasm of A549 cells (as shown in Figure 5C). The above data indicate that NCTD induced autophagy in A549 cells. Mitochondrial depolarization is a crucial early event in mitochondria [6]. We found that NCTD caused a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) (fig3). TOM20 protein is a mitochondrial outer membrane protein, so its reduced expression can reflect mitochondrial phagocytosis [9]. To further investigate whether mitochondrial phagocytosis occurs in cells treated with NCTD, we used immunoblotting to treat A549 at NCTD The expression of TOM20 after cell decline was shown in Figure 5B; a characteristic aggregation of TOM20 around the nucleus was observed (indicating mitochondria) (Figure 5D), These data suggest that NCTD induced cell phagocytosis in A549 cells
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