Abstract
Bax is a well-known universal proapoptotic protein. Bax protein is detected in almost all human organs, and its expression levels can be correlated with disease progression and therapeutic efficacy in certain settings. Interestingly, increasing evidence has shown that mature neuronal cell death is often not typical apoptosis. Most results on the expression of Bax proteins (predominantly Baxα) in the human brain come from disease-oriented studies, and the data on Bax protein expression in the normal brain are limited and lack consistency due to many variable factors. Here, we analyzed Bax RNA and protein expression data from multiple databases and performed immunostaining of over 80 samples from 25 healthy subjects across 7 different brain regions. We found that Bax protein expression was heterogeneous across brain regions and individual subjects. Both neurons and glial cells, such as astrocytes, could be Bax positive, but Bax positivity appeared to be highly selective, even within the same cell type in the same region. Furthermore, Bax proteins could be localized in the cytosol (evenly spread or concentrated to one region), nucleus or nucleolus depending on the cell type. Such variation and distribution in Bax expression suggest that Bax may function differently in the human brain than in other organs.
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Most data used in this work are available in the corresponding public databases. Data generated during this study are available upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the Illinois Institution of Technology research fund. The data used for the analyses described in this manuscript were obtained from the Human Protein Atlas, including Consensus, HPA, GTEx, and FANTOM5.
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YQ designed and performed experiments, data collection and analysis, and prepared figures and manuscript; HZ and AM, imaging processing and data analysis; CS, and JG data collection. JX managed the project, data interpretation, and manuscript preparation.
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Yao, Q., Zhang, H., Standish, C. et al. Expression profile of the proapoptotic protein Bax in the human brain. Histochem Cell Biol 159, 209–220 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00418-022-02146-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00418-022-02146-5