Over the past decade, PM2.5 level in the atmosphere is increasing across China and nearby beyond, leading to the ensuing respiratory and cardiovascular disease at warp speed. More and more experimental studies have been conducted to investigate the toxic effects of PM2.5 on human health and their underlying mechanisms both in vivo and in vitro. To our knowledge, most in vitro studies employ one or several types of cells to be directly exposed to PM2.5 and explore possible toxic mechanisms. It is also noteworthy that macrophages may play an important role in the process of PM2.5 invading the human body. Pulmonary macrophages exposed to PM2.5 secrete a variety of cytokines that are released into the adjacent tissue and affect the proximity cells. However, among the toxic researches of PM2.5, there is a lack of evaluation of direct and indirect exposure models on bronchial epithelia cells. It has been worthwhile to figure out the different performance of epithelium interacted with PM2.5 directly or indirectly.
PM2.5 direct interaction on epithelium may strengthen the cytotoxic action. Our MTT results found that cell proliferation showed more significant inhibition with the direct exposure model compared with the indirect model. However, the viability of epithelia cells in co-cultured model didn’t manifest a notable decrease in high concentration group. Exposure to environmental pollutants, allergens and pathogens can induce apoptosis of airway epithelial cells. Studies showed that PM exposure induced apoptosis by activating not only the tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha)-induced pathway, but also the mitochondrial pathway (Dagher et al. 2006). A recent research had demonstrated that a statistically significant association was demonstrated between the content of PAHs in PM2.5 and the rate of BEAS-2B apoptosis (p < 0.01) (Yang et al. 2016). Therefore, we speculated that the phagocytosis of macrophages may offset the cytotoxic effect of PM2.5, like PAHs in apoptosis,to maintain the epithelia function to some extent.
To further evaluate the effects of PM2.5 exposure on epithelial cells under different modes of interaction, we observed the oxidative stress transcription factor Nrf2 and the inflammatory response transcription factor NF-kB. In these two models, we found that different tendency occurred among NF-κB and downstream inflammatory cytokines, while there was no significant difference in the trend of Nrf2 in the two models. In the comparison of these two interaction models, the indirect stimulation model strengthen inflammation response of epithelial cells, especially under the effect of higher concentrations of PM2.5. According to the research, it has been demonstrated that PM2.5 exposure induce macrophage activation directly and initiate persistent inflammatory response via M1 polarization(Vogel et al. 2012). In general, macrophages can be polarized into M1/M2 distinct phenotypes: M1 macrophages which are mainly induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) considered to have higher antigen-presenting capacity and release a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines. On the contrary, M2 macrophages mainly induced by interleukin-4 (IL-4) act as anti-inflammatory ones (Zhu et al. 2015). The mounting evidence proved that PM2.5 drive macrophage into M1 phenotype (Zhao et al. 2016). According to a recent study, 25 µg/ml and higher concentration of PM2.5 derived from Beijing, which was identical with our sources induced the expression and secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines by M1 macrophage. Whereas, different concentrations of PM2.5 didn’t affect the expression of M2 macrophage markers (Zhong et al. 2019). Therefore, combining with our results, we proposed PM2.5-induced M1 macrophages release pro-inflammatory cytokines which could freely pass through the membrane hole in co-cultures cause a stronger inflammatory response on the epithelium than PM2.5 directly acting with epithelia.
It has been reported that the water-soluble fraction, which accounts for the major proportion of PM2.5 (Tan et al. 2017), induces more abnormal biological outcomes than water-insoluble PM2.5 components (Gutierrez-Castillo et al. 2006). Therefore, in addition to pro-inflammatory cytokines released from PM2.5-induced M1 macrophages, the water-soluble fraction of PM2.5 such as metal(loid)s, ions and PAHs could freely pass through the membrane hole and trigger stronger inflammatory response on epithelia. Our studies indicated that the batch of PM2.5 we collected before contained high concentration of PAHs and metals such as Zn, Pb, Mn and Cu. A former study has demonstrated a strong relationship between IL-6/TNF-α secretion with the presence of Cu and Zn from anthropogenic sources PM2.5 in Mexicali (Osornio-Vargas et al. 2011). According to a recent investigation in which PM2.5 was sampled in 10 large Chinese cities over 1 year, IL-6 was significantly correlated with Pb, and endotoxin (Ma et al. 2019). Additional, it has reported that Mn and Cr were associated with IL-8 production in epithelial cells. Taken together, amid the process of PM2.5 stimulation, the presence of macrophage could strengthen the inflammation of epithelia.