Abstract
Aquaporins (AQPs) are widely expressed in various types of tissues, among them AQP1, AQP4 and AQP9 are expressed predominately with relatively special distributing features in various brain regions. The aberrant changes of AQP1 and AQP4 have been observed in the brains of Alzheimer disease (AD). To evaluate the underlying alteration of brain AQPs in prion diseases, scrapie strains of 139A, ME7 and S15 infected mice were tested in this study. Western blots revealed markedly increased levels of AQP1, AQP4 and AQP9 in the brain tissues of all tested scrapie-infected mice collected at terminal stage. Analyses of the AQPs levels in the brain tissues collected at different time-points during incubation period showed time-dependent increased in 139A and ME7-infected mice, especially at the middle-late stage. The AQP1 levels also increased in the cortex regions of some human prion diseases, including the patients with sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), fatal familial insomnia (FFI) and G114V genetic CJD (gCJD). Immunohistochemistry (IHC) assays verified that the AQPs-positive cells were astrocyte-like morphologically; meanwhile, numerous various sizes of AQPs-positive particles and dots were also observable in the brain sections of scrapie-infected mice. Immunofluorescent assays (IFAs) illustrated that the signals of AQPs colocalized with those of the GFAP positive proliferative astrocytes, and more interestingly, appeared to overlap also with the signals of PrP in the brains of scrapie-infected mice. Moreover, IHC assays with a commercial doublestain system revealed that distributing areas of AQPs overlapped not only with that of the activated large astrocytes, but also with that of abundantly deposited PrPSc in the brain tissues of scrapie murine models. Our data here propose the solid evidences that the expressions of brain AQP1, AQP4 and AQP9 are all aberrantly enhanced in various murine models of scrapie infection. The closely anatomical association between the accumulated AQPs and deposited PrPSc in the brain tissues indicates that the abnormally increased water channel proteins participate in the pathogenesis of prion diseases.