This Key Event Relationship is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. This license allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms.
Relationship: 2878
Title
Depletion, GSH leads to Increased, Reactive oxygen species
Upstream event
Downstream event
AOPs Referencing Relationship
| AOP Name | Adjacency | Weight of Evidence | Quantitative Understanding | Point of Contact | Author Status | OECD Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glutathione conjugation leading to reproductive dysfunction via oxidative stress | adjacent | High | High | Allie Always (send email) | Under Development: Contributions and Comments Welcome |
Taxonomic Applicability
Sex Applicability
Life Stage Applicability
| ID | Experimental Design | Species | Upstream Observation | Downstream Observation | Citation (first author, year) | Notes |
|---|
| Title | First Author | Biological Plausibility |
Dose Concordance |
Temporal Concordance |
Incidence Concordance |
|---|
Biological Plausibility
Dose Concordance Evidence
Temporal Concordance Evidence
Incidence Concordance Evidence
Uncertainties and Inconsistencies
| Modulating Factor (MF) | MF Specification | Effect(s) on the KER | Reference(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| antioxidant | vitamin E | restores the activity of antioxidant enzymes | Singh, Sandhir, and Kiran 2010 |
The close relation between GSH depletion and increase in ROS levels is a well-established biological process, which is a result of diverse experimental evidence.
Response-response Relationship
Drop in GSH levels and increase in ROS generation changes cellular redox potential, which can be calculated by the Nernst equation (Han et al. 2006):

where Ecell is cell electrochemical voltage, Eo is the electromotive force, R is molar gas constant, T is the temperature in Kelvin, F is the Faraday constant, n is the number of electrons transferred in the reaction, and Q is [GSH]2/[GSSG].
If GSH levels drop until a certain threshold (~30 - 40% of depletion) in mitochondria, there is an excessive H2O2 release in cells (Han et al. 2006) and, hence, ROS exacerbation.
Time-scale
For HT22 cells exposed to 50 µM BSO (for 10 h), ROS production occurs in two phases: an initial slow increase for the first 6 h, followed by a much higher rate. The latter high rate of increase in ROS only starts after the cellular GSH levels drop to nearly zero (Tan et al. 1998).
Moreover, isolated rat hepatocyte suspensions exposed to DEM (0.5, 1, 2.5 and 5 mM) for 5 h reach maximum levels of GSH depletion after 1 h of exposure (Tirmenstein et al. 2000), whereas the maximum increase in ROS levels is observed only after four hours at the two highest concentrations of each depleter.
GSH has its levels reduced by more than 95% in PW cells after around 8 h of exposure to BSO and reacher maximum depletion level at 48 h, when mitochondrial GSH supplies become undetectable as well, whereas ROS levels undergo a slight increase only 24 h post-exposure and reaches maximum values after 60 h of treatment (Armstrong et al. 2002).