Endothelial-derived exosomes induced by lipopolysaccharide alleviate rat cardiomyocytes injury and apoptosis.

Sepsis-induced myocardial dysfunction (SIMD) is one of the leading causes of death in sepsis. We hypothesized that exosomes released from ECs exposed to bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) have some regulatory effect on cardiomyocytes (CMs). In this study, cultured rat ECs were exposed to 0.5 µg/ml of LPS, and exosomes were isolated from the conditioned medium through ultra-high-speed centrifugation. The exosomes were given to the cultured neonatal rat CMs to test the potential effects and proceed to small RNA sequencing to identify their miRNA expression. We found exosomes from ECs under LPS stimulation (LPS-EC-Exo) enhanced the cell viability and attenuated the injury of CMs. The RNA sequencing depicted the expression of several miRNAs increased in LPS-EC-Exo compared with the exosomes from the control ECs (NC-EC-Exo). Further analysis showed that some miRNAs could promote the survival of CMs by down-regulating the expression of apoptosis-related proteins such as BAK1, P53, and PTEN. This study showed that LPS-EC-Exo has a cardiac protective effect on CMs, which miRNAs may achieve. AJTR