著者

Katada Shun Mito Takayuki Ogasawara Emi Hayashi Jun-Ichi Nakada Kazuto

出版者

Genetics Society of America

雑誌

G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics (ISSN:21601836)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.3, no.9, pp.1545-1552, 2013-09

被引用文献数

15

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Studies in patients have suggested that the clinical phenotypes of some mitochondrial diseases might transit from one disease to another (e.g., Pearson syndrome [PS] to Kearns-Sayre syndrome) in single individuals carrying mitochondrial (mt) DNA with a common deletion (∆mtDNA), but there is no direct experimental evidence for this. To determine whether ∆mtDNA has the pathologic potential to induce multiple mitochondrial disease phenotypes, we used trans-mitochondrial mice with a heteroplasmic state of wild-type mtDNA and ∆mtDNA (mito-mice∆). Late-stage embryos carrying ≥50% ∆mtDNA showed abnormal hematopoiesis and iron metabolism in livers that were partly similar to PS (PS-like phenotypes), although they did not express sideroblastic anemia that is a typical symptom of PS. More than half of the neonates with PS-like phenotypes died by 1 month after birth, whereas the rest showed a decrease of ∆mtDNA load in the affected tissues, peripheral blood and liver, and they recovered from PS-like phenotypes. The proportion of ∆mtDNA in various tissues of the surviving mito-mice∆ increased with time, and Kearns-Sayre syndrome−like phenotypes were expressed when the proportion of ∆mtDNA in various tissues reached >70–80%. Our model mouse study clearly showed that a single ∆mtDNA was responsible for at least two distinct disease phenotypes at different ages and suggested that the level and dynamics of ∆mtDNA load in affected tissues would be important for the onset and transition of mitochondrial disease phenotypes in mice.