The Effect of Nicotine and Sirtuins on Neuronal Cells

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that smokers have a lower prevalence of certain neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD). Nicotine and nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonists have been studied both in vivo and in vitro and reported to show neurodegenerative and neuroprotective effects. The effects of nicotine have not been studied in the NT2 cell line. Nor has a combination of nicotine with SRT1720, a Sirtuin1 agonist reported to be involved in neural plasticity, been investigated in this cell model. NT2 is a human teratocarcinoma cell line that is a helpful in vitro system for studying human neuronal and glial activities. Thus, this research examined the effects of different doses of nicotine at different time intervals, as well as investigated the protective effects of SRT1720 on NT2 cells. The results demonstrated that a high dose of nicotine significantly reduced cell activity in a time and concentration-dependent manner. A reduction in cell activity was found to be related to apoptotic and necrotic cells detected following a high dose of nicotine. In contrast, a combination of low concentration of SRT1720 with a low dose of nicotine increased NT2 cell metabolic activity. Future studies could investigate the effect of pre-treatment and post-treatment of SRT1720 in nicotine-treated cells to understand the mechanism by which SRT1720 exerts a protective effect in NT2 cells.