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Mechanism analysis of toxicity of sodium sulfite to human hepatocytes L02

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Abstract

Food additives are widely used in various food products to preserve the taste, color, and other qualities. However, if they are used improperly or exceed the standard, they will cause damage to the human body. Sulfite is a commonly used food additive to prevent oxidation from deteriorating the nutrients in foods, it has been widely used as a bleaching agent in the food industry for a long time. In this study, human hepatocytes L02 cells were used as a model cell line to evaluate the toxicity of sodium sulfite. The cell morphology and cell proliferation were affected by sodium sulfite treatment, and apoptosis was detected. Transcriptome sequencing showed 97 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the experimental group (IC50) and the control group (MOCK), and 27 differentially expressed genes related to cell apoptosis, metabolism and inflammation were selected for validation by qPCR. Among them, 13 significantly upregulated genes and 14 significantly downregulated genes were identified by qPCR. The results showed that with increase of sodium sulfite concentration, the morphology of L02 changed, cell proliferation and activity were inhibited, and sodium sulfite caused apoptosis in a concentration- and time-dependent manner. The resulting toxic mechanism inhibits proliferation, damages the mitochondrial integrity, and promotes apoptosis.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Shanghai Meiji biomedical technology co., LTD for providing technical support of this manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Nos.31872425, 31861143051, 31702186, 31802140].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Life Sciences, Jiangsu University, 301 Xuefu Road, Zhenjiang, 212013, People’s Republic of China

    Xu Han, Feifei Zhu, Liang Chen, Hong Wu, Tao Wang & Keping Chen

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  1. Xu Han
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Correspondence to Keping Chen.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 8 and Tables 1 and 2.

Fig. 8
figure 8

qRT-PCR verified the expression of 27 differentially expressed genes; qRT-PCR used the same RNA samples (three samples from each treatment group). All qRT-PCR data were shown as mean ± standard error. Their expression relative to β-Actin was quantified by qRT-PCR. a Indicated the expression level of the upregulated gene b Indicated the expression level of the downregulated gene. The results were expressed as the Duncan test in one way ANOVA to calculate its p value. * indicated p < 0.05; ** indicated p < 0.01; *** indicated p < 0.001

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Table 1 Fluorescence quantitative PCR primer design
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Table 2 Statistics of numerical differences between upregulated genes and downregulated genes in the experimental group and the control group
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Han, X., Zhu, F., Chen, L. et al. Mechanism analysis of toxicity of sodium sulfite to human hepatocytes L02. Mol Cell Biochem 473, 25–37 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11010-020-03805-8

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