Abstract
A specific and sensitive assessment tool for individuals with zinc deficiency is greatly needed. To identify candidate markers holding the potential to indicate zinc status, a dietary regimen inducing acute zinc depletion was applied to healthy male subjects for a period of 10 days. Decreased serum zinc concentrations confirmed the zinc-depleted status of each participant along with a reduction in buccal metallothionein (MT) transcript levels. By using qPCR, we observed significant reductions in abundance of MT, ZnT1, ZnT4 and ZnT5 mRNA levels of peripheral blood mononuclear cells and in ZnT1 and Zip3 transcripts of purified reticulocytes by dietary zinc depletion. The reduction of ZnT1 mRNA levels was measurable in whole blood RNA as well. Microarray analyses with globin RNA-depleted whole blood RNA were conducted for the identification of other genes affected by dietary zinc intake levels. Additionally, we confirmed the presence of ZnT1 and Zip10 in the plasma membrane of human erythrocytes, of which differential expression by zinc deficiency has been shown in mouse models. Cytokine release from heparinized whole blood stimulated with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) or phytohemagglutinin (PHA) in vitro was measured by ELISA. Depression in both LPS- and PHA-induced TNF-α production was observed after subjects were fed the zinc depleted diet. Grant Funding Source: NIH Grant DK 31127 (RJC) and CALS Alumni Fellowship (MSR)
Published Version
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