After birth, those progeny were reared by their mothers until they were three weeks old, at which point they were killed and their livers analysed to study the activity of genes involved in metabolism.As they report in Cell, Dr Rando and his team found 445 genes whose expression appeared to depend strongly on the diet of the father.
These results indicate that primary hepatocytes and liver slices are valid liver models to study genes induced by activation of PPARα with Wy14643, but less suitable to study genes downregulated by activation of PPARα with Wy14643.
Van de Bovenkamp et al. used human liver slices to study the development of liver fibrosis and Salonen et al. studied the metabolic clearance of selegiline, a drug used to treat patients suffering from Parkinson disease [ 15– 17].
Although in vitro and ex vivo systems turned out to be relevant liver models to study the PPARα transcriptome compared to the in vivo situation, liver slices behaved as an intermediate model between in vitro and in vivo, and thus represent a superior replacement for primary hepatocytes.
In addition, we aimed to assess the performance of in vitro and ex vivo liver models to study the PPARα transcriptome in relation to the in vivo situation.
Zalko et al. and De La Torre et al. used bovine liver slices to study the metabolism of clenbuterol and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), respectively [ 18, 19].
Stefflova K, Thybert D, Wilson MD, Streeter I, Aleksic J, Karagianni P, Brazma A, Adams DJ, Talianidis I, Marioni JC, Flicek P, Odom DT, 2013, ChIP-seq of adult wild-type rat liver cells to study genome wide location of HNF4a, FoxA1 CEBPA, E-MTAB-1415 ; http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress/experiments/E-MTAB-1415/, Publicly available at EBI ArrayExpress.
Recent studies suggest that the effluent perfusate of isolated perfused rat liver can be used to study the liver secretome, i.e. the proteins secreted by the various liver cell types.
Due to the complexity of FHF many diverse attempts have been made to develop an adequate animal model to study liver failure, liver regeneration and liver support systems.
Mice lacking c-Met in the liver were generated to study the role of endogenous HGF and its receptor in liver regeneration.
