Abstract: OBJECTIVE: To investigate protective potential of deer serum on cardiomyocyte injury which was induced by glucose deprivation. METHODS: Cardiomyocytes were cultured in vitro and were subjected to glucose deprivation for 18 h to induce myocardial cell injury. An objective was to observe whether deer serum would alleviate the injury by 6 h and 12 h preconditioning, using sheep serum as comparison. The cardiomyocyte cultures were divided into several groups:normal control, model, deer serum-treated (5、10 and 20 mg/mL) and sheep serum-treated (5, 10 and 20 mg/mL) groups. Effects of cell morphology, relative activity of myocardial cells, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) leakage, malondialdehyde (MDA) content, glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity were used as evaluation indexes. RESULTS: Compared with the model and the normal control groups, the 6 h pretreatment by both sera significantly increased the relative activities of cardiomyocytes at different concentrations (P < 0.01), but there was no significant difference between the deer and the sheep serum groups (P > 0.05). After pretreatment for 12 h with different concentrations of deer serum, the relative activities of myocardial cells were significantly increased over the model group (P < 0.01), but the increases were lower than that of the normal control group (P < 0.05). There was no statistical significance in activities after treatment with the different concentrations of sheep serum (P > 0.05). The relative activities of myocardial cells in the 20 mg/mL deer serum group was significantly higher than that in the 20 mg/mL sheep serum group (P < 0.01).On the other hand, the concentrations of LDH in the deer serum groups was significantly decreased compared with the model group (P < 0.01). Activities of GSH-Px in the 20 mg/mL deer serum group and in different concentrations (5, 10, 20 mg/mL) of the sheep serum groups were significantly increased (P < 0.01), and activities of SOD in the 10 mg/mL deer serum group was significantly increased (P < 0.01). CONCLUSION: Deer serum preconditioning had a protective effect against cardiomyocyte apoptosis which was induced by glucose deprivation. The mechanism may be related to protection against oxygen free radical damage and stabilization of cell membrane.

Key words: deer serum, pretreatment, cardiomyocyte, no glucose