Abstract

Since oxidative stress plays important pathological roles in numerous diseases, it is of both critical theoretical and clinical significance to search for the approaches for predicting oxidative damage. Cellular models have great value for studying oxidative damage, which would be significantly promoted if non-invasive approaches for predicting oxidative damage can be established without the need of exogenous probes. In our current study, we tested our hypothesis that changes of the autofluorescence (AF) of cells may be used for predicting oxidative cellular damage. Our study found that H2O2 dose-dependently increased the green AF of HaCaT keratinocyte cell line at non-nuclear regions assessed at 1 hr or 3 hrs after the H2O2 exposures, while H2O2 did not affect the green AF of other cell types tested in our study, including PC 12 cells and BV2 microglia. We further found that the increases in the AF of HaCaT cells are highly correlated with the H2O2-induced increases in early-stage apoptosis, late-stage apoptosis and necrosis assessed at 18 hrs after the H2O2 exposures, which are also negatively correlated with the intracellular ATP levels of the H2O2-treated cells assessed at 18 hrs after the H2O2 exposures. Collectively, our study has suggested that increased AF may become the first endogenous marker for non-invasive prediction of oxidative damage selectively for such cell types as HaCaT cells. Compared with traditional approaches, our method may have significant value for studying oxidative damage of keratinocytes with significantly higher efficiency and lower cost.