Abstract: Heart is the sensitive organ to hypoxia and in response to low oxygen availability numerous adaptive responses are initiated at the molecular, cellular and organ level. Cardiomyocytes increase their cardioprotective capacity in response to hypoxic conditions to survive the stress conditions. There are different possibilities, like increased transcriptions or translation which will account for the increased cardioprotective capacity of cardiomyocytes under hypoxic conditions. However, none of these account fully with the observed increase in the cardioprotective activity of cardiomyocytes. Moreover, it is well known that during hypoxia the cap dependent protein translation is decreased, but still expression levels of few cardioprotective mRNAs are enhanced. Cap-independent translation, mediated by Internal Ribosome Entry Sites (IRES) is an alternative strategy used by cells to maintain the translation rate of some mRNAs under stress conditions, like hypoxia. Thus we hypothesize that cap-independent translation may play a critical role in enhancing the cardioprotective role of cardiomyocytes under hypoxic conditions.
Keywords: Hypoxia, cardioprotection, Internal Ribosome Entry Sites, 5′ untranslated region.
Title: Increased Cardioprotective Capacity of Cardiomyocytes during Hypoxia: A Possible Role of Cap Independent Translation
Author: Ajaz Ahmad Waza, Shabir Ahmad Bhat, Zeenat Hamid
International Journal of Healthcare Sciences
ISSN 2348-5728 (Online)
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