Renal epithelial-derived miR-17~92 inhibits STAT3 signaling, serving a sex-specific and renoprotective role in the development of AKI
Authors: Suda Amanda , Liu Xiaoning , Ozbaki Yagan Nejla , Tan Roderick , Ho Jacqueline , Butterworth Michael 
Published: May 2024

Prerenal acute kidney injury (AKI) is a sudden loss of kidney excretory function from reduced blood flow to the kidney. Sex differences in the degree of injury have been recognized, the causes of which are ill-defined. While a role for miRs (microRNAs) in AKI has been recognized, there are no reports of sex differences in miR regulation after injury. Here we investigated sex differences in miR regulation in proximal tubular epithelial cells during AKI with IRI (ischemia reperfusion injury) in vivo and miR regulation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) signaling in vitro. We hypothesize that sex-differentially expressed miR-17~92 serves as a negative regulator of STAT3 signaling, repressing proinflammatory signaling in tubular epithelium during AKI. We recapitulated the phenotype that males have a higher level of injury compared to females with proportional intensity and duration of IRI in a murine AKI model. C57BL/6J mice underwent 25 minutes of unilateral IRI with a contralateral nephrectomy and sacrificed 18 hours post-reperfusion. Injured male tubules showed a significant increase in Kidney injury molecule-1 (Kim-1) expression (n³3, fold change=75.28 ± 35.92) whereas injured females showed no change, confirming that injured males experience a higher level of tubular injury than females with a matched degree of ischemia. Control female tubules showed significantly higher baseline expression of miR-17~92 compared to control males (n ³ 5, difference between means ± SEM: miR-17a, 2.337 ± 0.6322; miR-18a, 5.841 ± 2.008; miR-19a, 5.041 ± 1.232; miR- 19b, 3.826 ± 0.9791; miR-20a, 3.826 ± 1.053; miR-92a, 5.627 ± 1.588). MiR-17~92 expression in injured male tubules significantly increased compared to male controls. Even after this increase, miR-17~92 expression in male tubules was lower compared to miR-17~92 in injured females. Mir-17~92 is predicted to target STAT3 and components of the interleukin-6 (IL6)/STAT3 pathway. qPCR showed a significant increase in Stat3 expression after IRI in both sexes, but only a significant increase in IL6 and heme oxygenase-1 in injured males. To investigate miR regulation of STAT3 in vitro, we used a human proximal tubule cell line (HK2) model. Recombinant IL6 induced STAT3 protein expression and phosphorylation, and increased miR-17~92 expression. By altering miR-17~92 expression in HK2 cells we demonstrated that expression of STAT3 in response to IL6 is regulated, in part, by these miRs. These data provide the first example of sex-differential miR regulation in response to IRI. The elevated baseline expression of miR-17~92 in the female mice may provide a novel mechanism to account for sex-differences in IRI-AKI and may form part of the mechanism to protect female kidney epithelia from IRI and AKI. This work is supported by the NIH (DK102843 to MBB), (NIH R01DK102843-08S1 to AS), NIH (DK137419 and DK125015 to JH) and NIH (5R01DK131991 and 5R01DK064005 to RT). This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.