Figure 1.

Expression of the perilipin family in liver and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). (A) Quantitative real-time PCR analysis of hepatic Plin2, Plin3, Plin4 and Plin5 expression in healthy mice (n = 4), non-tumoral liver (n = 8) and tumoral liver extracts (n = 8) of HCC mice. The quantity of mRNA in healthy mouse livers was set to 1, and expression levels in the HCC groups were expressed as relative values. All measurements were normalized to β-Actin expression. Primers are listed in Table 2. Statistical analysis was performed by Student t-test and standard deviations below 0.05 were considered significant. (B) Confirmation of differential expression of the perilipin proteins by Western blot analysis. Western blots were performed to detect PLIN2, PLIN3, PLIN4 and PLIN5 proteins in liver protein extracts from healthy mice (n = 3) and mice with HCC on tumoral and non-tumoral liver extracts (n = 8 animals/group). An extract of primary mouse hepatocytes (marked with asterisk), transient overexpressing PLIN5, was used to define the protein band of PLIN5 as it is lowly expressed in liver. Glycerinaldehyd-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) was used as a loading control. The antibodies used are listed in Table 1.