Artesunate interacts with Vitamin D receptor to reverse mouse model of sepsis-induced immunosuppression via enhancing autophagy

Shenglan Shang; Jiaqi Wu; Xiaoli Li; Xin Liu; Pan Li; Chunli Zheng; Yonghua Wang; Songqing Liu; Jiang Zheng; Hong Zhou

VDR physically interacts with NF-κB p65 in mouse embryonic fibroblast cells and intestinal cells (Sun et al., 2006; Wu et al., 2010) , but it remains unclear that the functional relevance of this VDR/NF-κB p65 interaction in LPS tolerance macrophages. Herein, co-IP and fluorescent co-localization experiments were performed. The results showed that the associated NF-κB p65 level in cytoplasm protein had no significant change in the medium cells, LPS cells and LPS tolerance cells when an equal amount of VDR was used as a control (pull-down by VDR), but significantly decreased by AS treatment (Figure 6a1 ). However, AS had no effect on the nucleus protein of the associated NF-κB p65 in each treatment when an equal amount of VDR was used as a control (pull-down by VDR) (Figure 6a2 ). These results suggested that AS might bind VDR to interrupt the interaction between VDR and NF-κB p65 in cytoplasm, further implied that AS might affect the activity of NF-κB p65.