In brown-fat mitochondria, fatty acids induce thermogenic uncoupling through activation of UCP1 (uncoupling protein 1). However, even in brown-fat mitochondria from UCP1-/- mice, fatty-acid-induced uncoupling exists. In the present investigation, we used the inhibitor CAtr (carboxyatractyloside) to examine the involvement of the ANT (adenine nucleotide translocator) in the mediation of this UCP...

      Doxorubicin (DOX) is an anthracycline antibiotic that has been used for a long time in therapy of an array of human malignancies either alone or in combination with other cytotoxic agents. The dose-dependent cardiotoxicity of DOX significantly limits its anticancer efficacies. Oxidative stress caused by enhanced production of reactive oxygen species is an important contributor to DOX mito...

Evidence is given indicating that the outer membrane of mitochondria from AH-130 Yoshida ascites hepatoma has low resistance to trypsin. The outer membrane of freshly-isolated hepatoma mitochondria is impermeable to cytochrome c and dextran, but it seems to be easily digested by trypsin. The proteolytic enzyme partially inactivates the adenylate kinase and cytochrome c oxidase of these mitochon...

Carrier-mediated citrate transport has been demonstrated and characterized at 10°in mitochondria from Morris hepatomas 3924A and 16 and in normal and host liver preparations by the inhibitor-stop technique using 1,2,3-benzenetricarboxylate. We studied: (a) citrate influx in exchange for endogenous substrates; (b) citrate influx into mitochondria loaded with citrate; (c) citrate efflux from cit...

The liver is one of the richest organs in terms of number and density of mitochondria. Most chronic liver diseases are associated with the accumulation of damaged mitochondria. Hepatic mitochondria have unique features compared to other organs' mitochondria, since they are the hub that integrates hepatic metabolism of carbohydrates, lipids and proteins. Mitochondria are also essential in hepato...

Impaired mitochondrial function is implicated in the development of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). This was investigated in mitochondria from skeletal muscle and liver of the Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rat, which spontaneously develops T2DM with age. The early and the manifest stage of T2DM was studied in 6- and 16-wk-old GK rats, respectively. In GK16 compared with GK6 animals, a decrease in state 3...

Prompted by pronounced structural differences between rat liver and rat hepatocellular carcinoma mitochondria, we suspected these mitochondrial populations to differ massively in their molecular composition. Aiming to reveal these mitochondrial differences, we came across the issue on how to normalize such comparisons and decided to focus on the absolute number of mitochondria. To this end, flu...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Although acute exhaustive exercise is known to increase liver reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and aerobic training has shown to improve the antioxidant status in the liver, little is known about mitochondria adaptations to aerobic training. The main objective of this study was to investigate the effects of the aerobic training on oxidative stress markers and antioxi...

1. A method was devised to allow determination of intramitochondrial aspartate amino-transferase activity in suspensions of intact mitochondria. 2. Addition of purified rat liver mitochondrial aspartate aminotransferase to suspensions of rat liver mitochondria caused an apparent increase in the intramitochondrial enzyme activity. No increase was observed when the mitochondria were preincubated ...

Kidney and liver mitochondria of rat, rabbit and guinea pig are able to transform 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutarate into acetoacetate, whereas ox liver mitochondria and rat mitochondria of heart, diaphragm and brain do not exhibit such an activity. Starvation and streptozotocin treatment decreases the formation of acetoacetate from 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutarate. Addition of acetoacetate and succinate t...