Research Paper Volume 11, Issue 17 pp 7294—7306
Impact of NF-κB pathway on the apoptosis-inflammation-autophagy crosstalk in human degenerative nucleus pulposus cells
- 1 Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China
- 2 Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Hechuan District People's Hospital of Chongqing, Chongqing, China
- 3 Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, The Affiliated Hospital of Guizhou Medical University, Guizhou, China
Received: April 25, 2019 Accepted: September 2, 2019 Published: September 13, 2019
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102266How to Cite
Copyright © 2019 Yi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The NF-κB pathway has been reported to play a very important role in the process of intervertebral disc degeneration (IVDD). Our results demonstrated that knockdown of NF-κB with P65-siRNA can significantly decrease cell apoptosis and the expression of pro-inflammation factors TNF-α and IL-1β in LPS-induced nucleus pulposus cells (NPCs). However, the molecular mechanism of NF-κB pathway exerting anti-inflammation and anti-apoptosis function remains unclear. Some researchers reported that inhibiting NF-κB pathway can attenuate the catabolic effect by promoting autophagy during inflammatory conditions in rat nucleus pulposus cells. Therefore, we hypothesized that in human NPCs, inhibiting NF-κB pathway may also promote autophagy. Our results indicated that after knockdown of NF-κB, the autophagy was significantly increased and the expression of p-AKT and p-mTOR protein markedly decreased, but the level of autophagy was inhibited after treatment with AKT activator SC79, suggesting the involvement of AKT/mTOR–mediated autophagy was under autophagy activation. However, both LPS-induced NPCs apoptosis and expression of pro-inflammation factors were further increased by pretreatment with the autophagy inhibitor chloroquine (CQ). These suggested that inhibiting NF-κB pathway can promote autophagy and decrease apoptosis and inflammation response in LPS-induced NPCs. Meanwhile, autophagy triggered by NF-κB inhibition plays a protective role against apoptosis and inflammation.