Extracellular ATP inhibits adrenergic agonist-induced hypertrophy of neonatal cardiac myocytes

We have previously shown that extracellular ATP, like norepinephrine (NE) and many other hypertrophy-inducing agents, increases expression of the immediate-early genes c-fos and junB in cultured neonatal cardiac myocytes but that the intracellular signaling pathways activated by ATP and responsible for these changes differ from those stimulated by NE. Furthermore, whereas NE increases incorporation of [¹⁴C]phenylalanine (¹⁴C-Phe) and cell size in neonatal cardiomyocytes, ATP does not. Since ATP is coreleased with NE from sympathetic nerve endings in the heart, we investigated whether ATP could modulate cardiac hypertrophy induced by adrenergic agonists, such as NE. We report in the present study that extracellular ATP inhibited the increase in incorporation of ¹⁴C-Phe into cellular protein and the increase in cell size in neonatal rat cardiac myocytes that was induced by NE, phenylephrine (PE), basic fibroblast growth factor, or endothelin-1. This inhibition was dose dependent, occurred predominantly through P₂ purinergic receptors, and was observed even when cells were treated with ATP for as little as 1 hour before the addition of the hypertrophy-inducing agent. ATP also selectively affected changes in gene expression associated with hypertrophy. It prevented PE-stimulated increases in atrial natriuretic factor and myosin light chain-2 mRNA levels, while appearing to augment basal and PE-stimulated skeletal α-actin mRNA levels. ATP alone increased sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca²⁺-ATPase mRNA levels but had no effect when added with PE. ATP did not significantly affect the level of the constitutively expressed mRNA for GAPDH. Neither the PE-stimulated increase in immediate-early gene expression nor the initial induction of mitogen-activated protein kinase activity by PE was inhibited by ATP. These results demonstrate that extracellular ATP can inhibit hypertrophic growth of neonatal cardiac myocytes and differentially alter the changes in gene expression that accompany hypertrophy.