Ruiz-Cordero Roberto, Gupta Alia, Jayakumar Arumugam R, Ciancio Gaetano, Nielsen Gunnlaugur Petur, Jorda Merce
Department of Hematopathology, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
Department of Pathology, Jackson Memorial Hospital/University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL 33136, USA.
Case Rep Endocrinol. 2017;2017:6734695. doi: 10.1155/2017/6734695. Epub 2017 Nov 26.
The adrenal glands produce a variety of hormones that play a key role in the regulation of blood pressure, electrolyte homeostasis, metabolism, immune system suppression, and the body's physiologic response to stress. Adrenal neoplasms can be asymptomatic or can overproduce certain hormones that lead to different clinical manifestations. Oncocytic adrenal neoplasms are infrequent tumors that arise from cells in the adrenal cortex and display a characteristic increase in the number of cytoplasmic mitochondria. Since the rate-limiting step in steroidogenesis includes the transport of cholesterol across the mitochondrial membranes, in part carried out by the 18-kDa translocator protein (TSPO), we assessed the expression of TSPO in a case of adrenal oncocytic neoplasm using residual adrenal gland of the patient as internal control. We observed a significant loss of TSPO immunofluorescence expression in the adrenal oncocytic tumor cells when compared to adjacent normal adrenal tissue. We further confirmed this finding by employing Western blot analysis to semiquantify TSPO expression in tumor and normal adrenal cells. Our findings could suggest a potential role of TSPO in the tumorigenesis of this case of adrenocortical oncocytic neoplasm.
肾上腺分泌多种激素，这些激素在血压调节、电解质平衡、新陈代谢、免疫系统抑制以及机体对压力的生理反应中发挥关键作用。肾上腺肿瘤可能无症状，也可能过度分泌某些激素，从而导致不同的临床表现。嗜酸细胞性肾上腺肿瘤是一种罕见的肿瘤，起源于肾上腺皮质细胞，其特征是细胞质线粒体数量增加。由于类固醇生成的限速步骤包括胆固醇跨线粒体膜的转运，部分由18 kDa转位蛋白（TSPO）完成，我们以患者残留的肾上腺组织作为内部对照，评估了1例肾上腺嗜酸细胞瘤中TSPO的表达。与相邻的正常肾上腺组织相比，我们观察到肾上腺嗜酸细胞瘤细胞中TSPO免疫荧光表达显著缺失。我们通过蛋白质印迹分析对肿瘤和正常肾上腺细胞中TSPO的表达进行半定量，进一步证实了这一发现。我们的研究结果可能提示TSPO在该例肾上腺皮质嗜酸细胞瘤的肿瘤发生中具有潜在作用。
