The riddle of mitochondrial caspase-3 from liver

Caspase-3 is one of the main executors of apoptosis. Its zymogen procaspase-3 was localized to cytosol, mitochondria and nuclei. The subcellular location of procaspase-3 in liver was reported by several studies to be either cytosolic or cytosolic and mitochondrial. Our aim was to investigate these separate procaspase-3 pools to differentiate the pathways of their activation. By cell fractionation, immunocytochemistry, and confocal microscopy we report that there is a single procaspase-3 pool located to the cytosol in primary hepatocytes and in fractions of rat liver. In contrast, it depends on the isolation purity whether procaspase-3 is located in mitochondria of non-parenchymal liver cells, or not. All preparations with mitochondrial procaspase-3 fractions contain traces of haemoglobin, indicating the presence of some erythrocytes, which are the source of mitochondrial procaspase-3. Since erythrocytes migrate with mitochondria in subcellular fractionations, it is important to check for haemoglobin, before localizing the protein to mitochondria.