Evaluating the Effects of CDK Inhibitors in Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury Models

CDK inhibitors have been used to induce protection in various experimental models. Kidney ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) is a form of acute kidney injury resulting in a cascade of cellular events prompting rapid cellular damage and suppression of kidney function. I/R injury, an inevitable impairment during renal transplant surgery, remains one of the major causes of acute kidney injury and represents the most prominent factor leading to delayed graft function after transplantation. Understanding the molecular events responsible for tubule damage and recovery would help to develop new strategies for organ preservation. This chapter describes procedures to study the effect of CDK inhibitors in the cellular I/R model developed from an epithelial cell line deriving from pig kidney proximal tubule cells (LLC-PK1). We briefly describe methods for determining the protective effect of CDK inhibitors such as activation of caspase 3/7, western blot analysis, gene silencing, and immunoprecipitation.