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      Arginine Consumption by the Intestinal Parasite Giardia intestinalis Reduces Proliferation of Intestinal Epithelial Cells

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          Abstract

          In the field of infectious diseases the multifaceted amino acid arginine has reached special attention as substrate for the host´s production of the antimicrobial agent nitric oxide (NO). A variety of infectious organisms interfere with this part of the host immune response by reducing the availability of arginine. This prompted us to further investigate additional roles of arginine during pathogen infections. As a model we used the intestinal parasite Giardia intestinalis that actively consumes arginine as main energy source and secretes an arginine-consuming enzyme, arginine deiminase (ADI). Reduced intestinal epithelial cell (IEC) proliferation is a common theme during bacterial and viral intestinal infections, but it has never been connected to arginine-consumption. Our specific question was thereby, whether the arginine-consumption by Giardia leads to reduced IEC proliferation, in addition to NO reduction. In vitro cultivation of human IEC lines in arginine-free or arginine/citrulline-complemented medium, as well as in interaction with different G. intestinalis isolates, were used to study effects on host cell replication by MTT assay. IEC proliferation was further analyzed by DNA content analysis, polyamine measurements and expressional analysis of cell cycle regulatory genes. IEC proliferation was reduced upon arginine-withdrawal and also in an arginine-dependent manner upon interaction with G. intestinalis or addition of Giardia ADI. We show that arginine-withdrawal by intestinal pathogens leads to a halt in the cell cycle in IECs through reduced polyamine levels and upregulated cell cycle inhibitory genes. This is of importance with regards to intestinal tissue homeostasis that is affected through reduced cell proliferation. Thus, the slower epithelial cell turnover helps the pathogen to maintain a more stable niche for colonization. This study also shows why supplementation therapy of diarrhea patients with arginine/citrulline is helpful and that citrulline especially should gain further attention in future treatment strategies.

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          The Caco-2 cell line as a model of the intestinal barrier: influence of cell and culture-related factors on Caco-2 cell functional characteristics.

          The human intestinal Caco-2 cell line has been extensively used over the last twenty years as a model of the intestinal barrier. The parental cell line, originally obtained from a human colon adenocarcinoma, undergoes in culture a process of spontaneous differentiation that leads to the formation of a monolayer of cells, expressing several morphological and functional characteristics of the mature enterocyte. Culture-related conditions were shown to influence the expression of these characteristics, in part due to the intrinsic heterogeneity of the parental cell line, leading to selection of sub-populations of cells becoming prominent in the culture. In addition, several clonal cell lines have been isolated from the parental line, exhibiting in general a more homogeneous expression of differentiation traits, while not always expressing all characteristics of the parental line. Culture-related conditions, as well as the different Caco-2 cell lines utilized in different laboratories, often make it extremely difficult to compare results in the literature. This review is aimed at summarizing recent, or previously unreviewed, data from the literature on the effects of culture-related factors and the influence of line sub-types (parental vs. different clonal lines) on the expression of differentiation traits important for the use of Caco-2 cells as a model of the absorptive and defensive properties of the intestinal mucosa. Since the use of Caco-2 cells has grown exponentially in recent years, it is particularly important to highlight these methodological aspects in order to promote the standardization and optimisation of this intestinal model.
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            Almost all about citrulline in mammals.

            Citrulline (Cit, C6H13N3O3), which is a ubiquitous amino acid in mammals, is strongly related to arginine. Citrulline metabolism in mammals is divided into two fields: free citrulline and citrullinated proteins. Free citrulline metabolism involves three key enzymes: NO synthase (NOS) and ornithine carbamoyltransferase (OCT) which produce citrulline, and argininosuccinate synthetase (ASS) that converts it into argininosuccinate. The tissue distribution of these enzymes distinguishes three "orthogonal" metabolic pathways for citrulline. Firstly, in the liver, citrulline is locally synthesized by OCT and metabolized by ASS for urea production. Secondly, in most of the tissues producing NO, citrulline is recycled into arginine via ASS to increase arginine availability for NO production. Thirdly, citrulline is synthesized in the gut from glutamine (with OCT), released into the blood and converted back into arginine in the kidneys (by ASS); in this pathway, circulating citrulline is in fact a masked form of arginine to avoid liver captation. Each of these pathways has related pathologies and, even more interestingly, citrulline could potentially be used to monitor or treat some of these pathologies. Citrulline has long been administered in the treatment of inherited urea cycle disorders, and recent studies suggest that citrulline may be used to control the production of NO. Recently, citrulline was demonstrated as a potentially useful marker of short bowel function in a wide range of pathologies. One of the most promising research directions deals with the administration of citrulline as a more efficient alternative to arginine, especially against underlying splanchnic sequestration of amino acids. Protein citrullination results from post-translational modification of arginine; that occurs mainly in keratinization-related proteins and myelins, and insufficiencies in this citrullination occur in some auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis or multiple sclerosis.
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              Bacteria and host interactions in the gut epithelial barrier.

              The gut mucosa acts as a barrier against microbial invaders, whereas resident commensal and foreign invading bacteria interact intimately with the gut epithelium and influence the host cellular and immune systems. The epithelial barrier serves as an infectious foothold for many bacterial pathogens and as an entry port for pathogens to disseminate into deeper tissues. Enteric bacterial pathogens can efficiently infect the gut mucosa using highly sophisticated virulence mechanisms that allow bacteria to circumvent the defense barriers in the gut. We provide an overview of the components of the mucosal barrier and discuss the bacterial stratagems that circumvent these barriers with particular emphasis on the roles of bacterial effector proteins.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2012
                19 September 2012
                : 7
                : 9
                : e45325
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Biomedical Centre Uppsala, University of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden
                [2 ]Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martin Ferreyra-Conicet, Córdoba, Argentina
                [3 ]Department of Experimental Medical Science, Biomedical Centre Lund, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden
                Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Haifa 32000 Israel, Israel
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: BS SGS. Performed the experiments: BS MCM LP. Analyzed the data: BS MCM LP SGS. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: BS LP SGS. Wrote the paper: BS SGS.

                Article
                PONE-D-12-17783
                10.1371/journal.pone.0045325
                3446895
                23028934
                6adca1f7-4693-4dec-a892-2044bcff475c
                Copyright @ 2012

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 13 June 2012
                : 15 August 2012
                Page count
                Pages: 11
                Funding
                BS was funded by a grant from the Swiss National Foundation (SNF PBBEP3_133500). MCM received a stipend from Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina). This work was carried out within a grant from Vetenskapsrådet Medicin (VR-M 2009–3492,Sweden). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Microbiology
                Parasitology
                Parasite Physiology
                Protozoology
                Parastic Protozoans
                Host-Pathogen Interaction
                Medical Microbiology
                Microbial Control
                Microbial Pathogens
                Chemistry
                Organic Chemistry
                Organic Acids
                Amino Acids
                Medicine
                Gastroenterology and Hepatology
                Gastrointestinal Infections

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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