Figure 3.

Effects of lentivirus-mediated ALDH2 overexpression/knockdown on cerebral injury induced by MCAO. (A) The upper panel: time schedule for lentivirus injection, MCAO operation and sacrifice for examinations. The lower panel: Four sites for injection (yellow asterisk). Lentivirus (2 × 10⁶TU/site) was injected into the left cortex and hippocampus at 4 sites. (B) Upper panel: general view of lentivirus transfection in rat brain one week after injection (left, the brain was stained by Hoechst; right, GFP-containing transfection site). Lower panel: LV-GFP efficiently transfected neurons, as detected by colocalization with the neuron-specific marker NeuN. Scale bar, 20 μm. (C, D) Immunoblotting and quantification show efficient overexpression and knockdown of ALDH2 in local brain tissue of rats after 3 weeks. n = 3. The ALDH2 level of control group was set as 100. (E) The left panel shows representative 1% TTC staining of 7 corresponding coronal brain sections. The ischemic infarct region is white. The middle panel shows the infarct size and the right panel shows the neurological deficit scores (n = 5). Data are shown as mean ± SD. Data are analyzed by ANOVA followed by LSD post-hoc testing. ^*P < 0.05, ^**P < 0.01.