Reperfusion injury takes place when an animal or an organ is starved of oxygen, then exposed to oxygen again.
This occurs in strokes and organ transplants and causes many deaths per year. Now scientists at UNLV, Sable Systems International and UCSD have discovered that reperfusion injury can be induced in fruit-flies, a convenient, cheap, well-characterized model animal. The research paper describing their results will be published in PLoS ONE.
“With this new model, researchers can explore the mechanisms of reperfusion injury with a classic animal model that's much cheaper and easier to use than vertebrates such as mammals”, said Dr. John Lighton, an adjunct professor at UNLV, president of Sable Systems International (a Nevada based company that manufactures precision respirometry systems) and lead scientist. Dr. Pablo Schilman, a physiologist at UCSD, co-authored the research. “Use of this method creates a window into the cells' mitochondria. Using Drosophila as a model may mean faster progress in mitigating the human toll of reperfusion injury, which we still don't fully understand. And what we don't fully understand, we can't treat effectively.”
The study, which was funded by Sable Systems International's Basic Research Initiative and took place in Sable Systems' respirometry laboratory in Las Vegas, started out with the first detailed metabolic examination of the fruit-fly's ability to survive a complete lack of oxygen for an hour or more. “By accident,” explains Dr. Lighton, “we discovered that exposing fruit-flies to one or more brief bursts of oxygen while they were otherwise oxygen-starved, injured their respiratory systems irreversibly – classic reperfusion injury.”