Nitric Oxide Production in Cytokine Activated Macrophages - Lab Report Example

Apoptosis plays an important role in maintaining homeostasis in a number of physiological systems. NO can cause apoptosis to be induced in various cells including immune cells and tumor cells. Excessive and prolonged production of NO can trigger secondary damage of normal tissues. Therefore, the NO-secreting and activate macrophages needs to die or revert back to a resting state in order to prevent damaging of normal tissues (Tsujimoto, & Shimizu, 2005). Activation – induced apoptosis is the mechanism involving the removal of immunologically stimulated cells to help limit injury of normal tissues and to promote immunologic tolerance.

IL-2, one of the major cytokine, which is secreted from an activated lymphocyte during inflammatory or immune responses, can trigger various immune cells such as macrophages and lymphocytes to produce a plethora of cytokines including TNF-β, TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6, and IL-1α. (Tsujimoto, & Shimizu, 2005). These cytokines can potentially induce responding cells for instance macrophages to synthesize and produce high NO nitrite levels from l-arginine through the action of the enzyme called inducible nitric oxide synthase.

In this study, the focus was ascertaining the impact of the cytokines on the rate of synthesis and production of NO from macrophages (Hu, & Brindle, 2005). In relating the optical density to the levels of nitrite, volumes of standardized sodium nitrite solution 50µg/ml) was added to culture medium. It was observed that increase in the volume of Volume of 50µg/ml standard added to 0.5ml culture medium caused a corresponding increase in Optical density (OD) as depicted in table 01 and graph 01.

The results of this experiment indicate that cytokines have an impact on the production of NO by macrophages. The higher the number of cytokines used the higher the Optical density values hence the higher production of NO. The value for OD was lowest (OD=0.057)