SiRNA – mediated gene silencing of midkine affects Bcl-2 in primary murine hepatocytes

Introduction: Recently, we could show that a subset of developmentally regulated fetal liver genes are also expressed during adult liver regeneration. One of these genes, Midkine, was found to be strongly expressed in the early fetal liver and was also regulated in a 2/3 hepatectomy model with peak expression at 24h after resection. For further functional analysis we sucessfuly silenced the gene by targeted siRNA's in primary murine hepatocytes as demonstrated by “real-time“ PCR. We then investigated whether the inhibition of Midkine expression affects the expression of downstream genes. Since Midkine is known t…