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Low temperature exposure increases IL-6 expression in skeletal muscle cells

LIU Ben¹, XIU Wen-Jing¹, DUAN Jin-Jie¹, WANG Chun-Jiong^1,2,*

¹Department of Physiology and Pathophysiology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Tianjin 300070, China；²School of Nursing, Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin 300070, China

Abstract

The shivering and nonshivering thermogenesis in skeletal muscles is important for maintaining body temperature in a cold environment. In addition to nervous-humoral regulation, adipose tissue was demonstrated to directly respond to cold in a cell-autonomous manner to produce heat. However, whether skeletal muscle can directly respond to low temperature in an autoregulatory manner is unknown. Transient receptor potential (TRP) channels TRPM8 and TRPA1 are two important cold sensors. In the current study, we found TRPM8 was expressed in mouse skeletal muscle tissue and C2C12 myotubes by RT-PCR. After exposure to 33 °C for 6 h, the gene expression pattern of C2C12 myotubes was significantly changed which was evidenced by RNA-sequencing. KEGG-Pathway enrichment analysis of these differentially expressed genes showed that low temperature changed several important signaling pathways, such as IL-17, TNFα, MAPK, FoxO, Hedgehog, Hippo, Toll-like receptor, Notch, and Wnt signaling pathways. Protein-protein interaction network analysis revealed that IL-6 gene was a key gene which was directly affected by low temperature in skeletal muscle cells. In addition, both mRNA and protein levels of IL-6 were increased by 33 °C exposure in C2C12 myotubes. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated that skeletal muscle cells could directly respond to low temperature, characterized by upregulated expression of IL-6 in skeletal muscle cells.

Key words: skeletal muscle cells; low temperature; IL-6; TRPM8

Received: 　　Accepted:

Corresponding author: 王春炅　　E-mail: wangchunjiong@tmu.edu.cn

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2022.0022

Citing This Article：

LIU Ben, XIU Wen-Jing, DUAN Jin-Jie, WANG Chun-Jiong. Low temperature exposure increases IL-6 expression in skeletal muscle cells. Acta Physiol Sin 2022; 74 (2): 201-208 (in Chinese with English abstract).