Abstract

The primary risk factor for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is LDL cholesterol, which can be reduced by increasing cholesterol excretion from the body. Fecal cholesterol excretion can be driven by a hepatobiliary as well as a non-biliary pathway known as transintestinal cholesterol efflux (TICE). We previously showed that chronic knockdown of the hepatic cholesterol esterifying enzyme sterol O-acyltransferase 2 (SOAT2) increased fecal cholesterol loss via TICE. To elucidate the initial events that stimulate TICE, C57Bl/6 mice were fed a high cholesterol diet to induce hepatic cholesterol accumulation and were then treated for 1 or 2 weeks with an antisense oligonucleotide targeting SOAT2. Within 2 weeks of hepatic SOAT2 knockdown (SOAT2HKD), the concentration of cholesteryl ester in the liver was reduced by 70% without a reciprocal increase in hepatic free cholesterol. The rapid mobilization of hepatic cholesterol stores resulted in a ∼ 2-fold increase in fecal neutral sterol loss but no change in biliary cholesterol concentration. Acute SOAT2HKD increased plasma cholesterol carried primarily in lipoproteins enriched in apoB and apoE. Collectively, our data suggest that acutely reducing SOAT2 causes hepatic cholesterol to be swiftly mobilized and packaged onto nascent lipoproteins that feed cholesterol into the TICE pathway for fecal excretion.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-5-2014

Notes/Citation Information

Published in PLOS One, v. 9, issue. 6, e98953.

© 2014 Marshall et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0098953

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