Fig. 3.

4,4′-dimethoxychalcone promotes autophagy and cardioprotection in mice. a, b Autophagy induction in mouse heart tissue (a) determined by LC3 lipidation with leupeptin or vehicle injection after intraperitoneal injection of DMC (100 mg/kg) or DMSO (Ctrl.). n = 9 (Ctrl. Vehicle), 10 (DMC Vehicle), 3 (Leup.) animals, *P = 0.0105, **P = 0.0028; b representative immunoblot. c, d Infarction area per area at risk (AAR) (c) and representative images of left ventricular myocardial sections (scale bar: 1 mm) (d) after DMC treatment as in (a–b) followed by 3 h prolonged ischaemia in wild type (WT) and cardiac-specific Atg7 knockout mice (Atg7cKO). *P = 0.0134, n = 5 (Ctrl.), 6 (DMC), 3 (Atg7cKO) animals. Significance in (a, c) was assessed by two-sided Student’s t-tests between Ctrl. and DMC. Box plots represent IQR (line at median) and whiskers 10–90 percentile. Source data for (a, c) are provided as a Source Data file