Effects Of Adenovirus-mediated Gax Gene Transfection On Proliferation And Apoptosis Of Pulmonary Artery Smooth Muscle Cells Of Rats In Vitro And Its Mechanisms

Background and objective:Proliferation of pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells(PASMCs)is the pathology mechanism of the pulmonary vascular structural remodeling(PVSR) that occurs in hypoxic pulmonary hypertension(HPH).It is the direction that poeple make efforts to seek the mechanism of HPH by research of proliferation and apoptosis of PASMCs. Therefor, proliferation inhibition and apoptosis induction of PASMCs may be one of the effective methods to reduce the PVSR of HPH induced by hypoxia.Recent studies have demonstrated that Gas(Growth-arrest specific homeobox)gene mainly expressing in cardiovascular tissue is one of homeobox genes which regulate growth,differention and migration at a cellular level during embryogenesis.Overexpression of Gax in vascular smooth muscle cells(VSMCs) can inhibit cell proliferation and induce apoptosis. However, there is few study on the effect of Gax gene on PASMCs.And the important studies on Gax have been put on the proliferation.The biological behaviour of PASMCs is similar to that of VSMCs .Therefor, we guess that overexpression of Gas gene might inhibit PASMCs proliferation and induce apoptosis. This experiment is designed to investigate whether there is expression of Gax and effect of hypoxia on Gax expression in PASMCs. Moreover,we study the effects and its mechanisms of recombinant adenovirus vector encoding the Gax gene on proliferation and apoptosis of PASMCs.Methods:1. PASMCs derived from the pulmonary aortic explants of Wistar rats were primarily cultured,and confirmed by microscope andα-SM-actin immunocytochemistry.2.The expression of gax mRNA and protein in PASMCs was evaluated by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction(RT-PCR),Western blot and immunocytochemistry under normoxic and hypoxia conditions.