Figure 2

Hepcidin protein expression in brain and serum samples. A: Western blotting using a rabbit anti-hepcidin antibody revealed a ~ 2.8 kDa band consistent with hepcidin protein. Lane 1: cortex 2: sub-ventricular zone, 3: hippocampus and 4: rat serum. The highest intensity was seen in the sub-ventricular zone and cortex and lowest in hippocampus. Hepcidin was detected in serum as a band of same molecular mass as seen in brain tissues. A β-actin loading control was used to normalize data in brain tissue, this protein was absent from serum as expected. B: Graph shows the percentage of band intensity normalized to loading control (n = 3), * = p < 0.05, ** = p < 0.01, *** = p < 0.005. C: In human serum (lane 1–5) hepcidin was seen as a clear ~ 2.8 kDa band while in CSF (lane 6) hepcidin was very strongly expressed. A weak ~ 10 kDa pro-hepcidin band was seen in all human samples. An anti-albumin antibody and anti-β2Microglobulin antibodies were used as loading controls. These are single experiments to assess the antibody specificity and no statistical evaluation was performed.