Scientists have discovered why elevated levels of oxygen can result in enduring health issues in humans.
When it comes to oxygen, you can have too much of a good thing. Breathing air with oxygen levels higher than the standard 21 percent found in Earth’s atmosphere can lead to organ damage, seizures, and even death in both humans and animals. This is known as oxygen toxicity, or hyperoxia, and occurs when there is an excess of oxygen beyond the body’s needs. While scientists have been aware of this phenomenon, they have mostly relied on speculation to understand the underlying mechanisms of oxygen toxicity until now.
A recent study by Gladstone Institutes has revealed how excessive oxygen levels alter certain iron and sulfur-containing proteins within our cells, similar to the process of iron rusting. As a result, these “rusty” proteins trigger a chain reaction that causes damage to cells and tissues. The research, which has been published in the journal
“This study allowed us to put together a very specific timeline for what happens in hyperoxia,” says Gladstone Assistant Investigator Isha Jain, PhD, senior author of the new study. “The results weren’t at all what we were expecting, but it’s very interesting and exciting to now know how this sequence of events unfolds.”
An Understudied Question
At high levels, oxygen is toxic to every form of life, from bacteria and plants to animals and people. Of course, not enough oxygen is also fatal; there’s an intermediate, “Goldilocks” amount under which most life on Earth thrives—not too much and not too little.
While clinicians have long studied the details of how oxygen shortage impacts cells and tissues (for example, in heart attacks and strokes), the effects of excess oxygen have been relatively understudied.
“For many years, the medical teaching was that, to a certain degree, more oxygen was better, or at least benign, when treating patients with conditions such as heart attacks,” says Alan Baik, MD, a postdoctoral scholar in Jain’s lab and a cardiologist at UC San Francisco (UCSF). “But there has now been a growing number of clinical studies showing that excess oxygen actually leads to worse outcomes. This motivated us to better understand why excess oxygen can be toxic.”
Studies have recently revealed, for instance, that breathing too much supplemental oxygen might be detrimental to heart attack patients and premature infants. Similarly, in obstructive sleep apnea, the sudden bursts of oxygen that follow pauses in breathing have been shown to be a key component of how the disorder increases patients’ risks of chronic health problems.
Still, the mechanisms of these effects remained murky. Many researchers assumed that reactive oxygen
Using CRISPR, the researchers removed, one at a time, more than 20,000 different genes from human cells grown in the lab and then compared the growth of each group of cells at 21 percent oxygen and 50 percent oxygen.
“This kind of unbiased screen let us probe the contributions of thousands of different pathways in hyperoxia rather than just focusing on those we already suspected might be involved,” says Jain, who is also an assistant professor of biochemistry at UCSF. “It led us toward molecules that have never been uttered before in the same sentence as oxygen toxicity.”
Four molecular pathways stood out in the screen as being involved in the effects of hyperoxia. They related to diverse cellular functions including the repair of damaged
The researchers went on to show that, in as little as 30 percent oxygen, the iron-sulfur clusters in the four proteins become oxidized—they chemically react with oxygen atoms—and that change causes the proteins to degrade. As a result, cells stop functioning correctly and consume even less oxygen, causing a further increase in oxygen levels in the surrounding tissues.
“One important takeaway is that hyperoxia is not impacting cells and tissues solely through reactive oxygen species, as many had assumed,” says Jain. “That means the use of antioxidants—which can combat reactive oxygen species to some degree—is unlikely to be sufficient to prevent oxygen toxicity.”
Reference: “Oxygen toxicity causes cyclic damage by destabilizing specific Fe-S cluster-containing protein complexes” by Alan H. Baik, Augustinus G. Haribowo, Xuewen Chen, Bruno B. Queliconi, Alec M. Barrios, Ankur Garg, Mazharul Maishan, Alexandre R. Campos, Michael A. Matthay and Isha H. Jain, 8 March 2023, Molecular Cell.
DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2023.02.013
The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, CZ Biohub, the Sarnoff Cardiovascular Research Foundation, and UC San Francisco.