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. 2017 Jun 15;8(6):e99. doi: 10.1038/ctg.2017.25

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Copyright © 2017 The Author(s) Official journal of the American College of Gastroenterology

Clinical and Translational Gastroenterology is an open-access journal published by Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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Elevation in hepatic cathepsin L (CTSL) and cathepsin B (CTSB) expression in patients with liver cirrhosis. (a, b) Immunohistochemical localization of CTSL and CTSB in the human liver biopsies. In control liver tissue (n=13), punctuate pericanalicular cytoplasmic CTSL and CTSB expression was observed in hepatocytes (arrow), along with mild focal positivity in bile duct epithelial cells, and kupffer cells. Similar to controls, mild CTSL and CTSB immunoreactivity is seen in patients with chronic hepatitis (CVH, n=10). Whereas strong and diffuse immunostaining for both these proteases was evident in hepatocytes, ductal cells, infiltrating histiocytes, and fibrotic septae (indicated by arrows) in the liver of cirrhotic subjects (n=28) (Original magnification, × 200). (c, d) Total immunoscores of (c) CTSL and (d) CTSB were significantly higher in patients with liver cirrhosis compared with controls and CVH patients (mean±s.e.m., **P≤0.001 and ***P≤0.0001, scores of fibrotic patients vs. the corresponding non-fibrotic controls, Kruskal–Wallis H test was used to compare the means of all the groups).