Figure 7

Mitochondrial bioenergetics is abnormal in cultured neurons from diabetic mice and is corrected by IL-1β. OCR was measured at basal level with subsequent and sequential addition of oligomycin (1 μM), FCCP (1 μM), and rotenone (1 μM) + antimycin A (AA; 1 μM) to DRG neurons cultured from age-matched control (blue) and 3–5 month STZ-induced diabetic mice (black) in the presence of low dose neurotrophic growth factors. Data are expressed as OCR in pmol/min for 1000 cells (there were approximately 2500–5000 cells per well). Dotted lines, a–e in (a) have been used later for quantification of bioenergetics parameters. The OCR measurements in (a) control (blue), diabetic (black), or treated with IL-1β (green) at the 1 μM concentration of FCCP were plotted. Maximal respiration (d-e), coupling efficiency (c/a), respiratory control ratio (d/b) and spare respiratory capacity (d–a) in (b) are presented for control (blue), diabetic (black) and diabetic treated with IL-1β (green) and were calculated after subtracting the non-mitochondrial respiration (e) as described [41]. Values are mean ± SEM of n = 5 replicate cultures; *p < 0.05 by Student’s t-Test.