BAG3 role in cardiomyocytes physiopathology

Abstract

The anti-apoptotic protein BAG3 is expressed at high levels in skeletal and cardiac muscle in vivo. Our group recently focused its interest on BAG3 role in myocardiocyte proliferation, survival and response to stressful stimuli. We found that BAG3 is upregulated during the differentiation of cardiomyoblasts. Our results prompted us to verify whether bag3 silencing could affect the differentiation state of cardiocytes and we found that bag3 silencing resulted in highly reducing the levels of myogenin. Furthermore, we analyzed BAG3 expression and localization following cell exposure to oxidative stress. In particular, we found that epinephrine in vitro increases BAG3 expression in adult human cardiomyocytes. We evaluated whether BAG3 could be involved in the Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy (or stress cardiomyopathy) pathogenesis that is characterized by left ventricular dysfunction, with symptoms that can mimic an acute coronary syndrome. The absence of significant cardiovascular risk factors in patients affected by stress cardiomyopathy suggested that it might be associated with a possible genetic etiology. Therefore, we sequenced bag3 gene to check for polymorphisms in 29 patients and 1043 healthy donors. Three polymorphism were highly represented among patients (R71Q, C151R, P407L). We also showed for the first time that BAG3 protein is released from stressed cardiomyocytes and is found in chronic heart failure (HF) patients’ sera. Since anti-BAG3 antibodies are also present in patients’ sera, we developed an ELISA test for their specific detection. In serum samples from chronic HF patients, we found significantly higher values of anti-BAG3 antibodies respect to samples from healthy donors. The presence of anti-BAG3 antibodies in chronic HF patients’ sera and the availability of an ELISA test for their detection can contribute a novel tool for diagnostic and prognostic evaluations. [edited by author]