The Immunohistochemical Study Of Caspase-7 After Traumatic Brain Injury In Rats

Objective: Traumatic brain injury is very common to forensic officer, and there are two paths in cell death: necrosis and apoptosis. Apoptosis is a complicated process associated with the sequential-activating cascade of a family of caspase. To be a downstream executioner in the cascade of caspase, caspase-7 is made up of 303 amino acids and the molecular weight is about 35KD. Caspase-7 is distributed in the cytoplasm of many kinds of cell lines with proenzyme normally. In apoptosis, it is cleaved to two active subnits by the upstream members and then cleave a number of substrates. The early paradigm is that caspase-7 has little impact in the apoptosis in the brain. However, recent studies clearly imply that caspase-7 has an important role in apoptosis。We established the model of impact with free fall in rat's brain and examined the expression of caspase-7 to find the regularity. We hope to provide a new way to solve the difficult problem of wound age determination of traumatic brain injury.Methods: For the experiment, rats were divided into different groupswith complete random method and killed at 1h, 3h, 6h, 12h, 1d, 3d,...