The paper titled "In vitro-in vivo hybrid approach for studying modulation of NRF2 in immortalized bovine mammary cells" with Hunter Ford, Sebastiano Busato and Massimo Bionaz as authors was just published on Frontiers in Animal Science. Congratulations to Hunter as this is his first manuscript published as first author!
The nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (NRF2) is the master regulator of the antioxidant response in mammals. Dairy cows experience increased oxidative stress especially during the early postpartum. Our long-term goal is to improve the antioxidative response of the animals via nutrigenomic approaches. In this manuscript we have investigated the relevance of studying NRF2 in vitro by cultivating the cells in serum collected from cows. We used a gene reporter assay and have assessed several synthetic modulators of NRF2. Our data clearly demonstrated that the study of NRF2 in artificial media can be misleading and, thus, it is necessary to use blood serum. Our experiments also revealed a strong response of NRF2 to synthetic agonists tert-butylhydroquinone and sulforaphane (the latter enriched in crucifers) demonstrating their validity; however, the available antagonist are likely not good modulators, with brusatol depressing overall protein synthesis and ML385 failing to inhibit NRF2 in bovine. Overall, we have established a robust high-throughput in vitro system to study NRF2 modulation in bovine that is an essential step to develop nutrigenomic approaches to improve antioxidative response in dairy cows.
This is the first manuscript from the project titled Control of Oxidative Stress through Gene-Diet Interaction in Dairy Cows and it was funded by the Agriculture Research Foundation
The manuscript is open access and available here