Figure 3.

Effect of bioactive peptides and their derivatives on TNF-induced endothelial superoxide generation: (A) bioactive peptides (IRW and IQW); (B) respective dipeptides of IRW (IR and RW) and IQW (IQ and QW); (C) individual amino acids (I, R, Q, and W); peptide sequence combination of constituent amino acids (I+R+W and I+Q+W). Confluent HUVEC monolayers were pretreated for 20 h with 50 mol/L peptide and amino acids prior to 1 h of incubation with 5 ng/mL TNF. A representative set of images are shown. Data were calculated as MFI/cell and expressed as fold increase over the untreated control. Bars represent mean values (mean ± SEM, n = 8 independent experiments). (###) P < 0.001 and (#) P < 0.05, compared to untreated control; (∗∗) P < 0.01 and (∗) P < 0.05, compared to TNF alone. Bar graph having lighter color indicates that a particular treatment has a significant effect compared with TNF alone.