“…Intriguingly, the CAR, C/EBPβ and Oct-1 have been found to be activated by different forms of stress, which include serum starvation stress, endoplasmic reticulum stress, oxidative stress, radiation and DNA damage (Zhao et al, 2000;Jin et al, 2001;Osabe et al, 2009;Meir et al, 2010). Since the CYP2A6 is known to be induced by a variety harmful, structurally unrelated chemicals and pathophysiological conditions (Kirby et al, 1994;Donato et al, 2000;Niemela et al, 2000;De-Oliveira et al, 2006;Kirby et al, 2011;Abu-Bakar et al, 2013), and is highly expressed in the liver , lung, oesophagus, intestinal, oral and bronchial epithelium (Su et al, 1996;Koskela et al, 1999;Janmohamed et al, 2001;Oyama et al, 2006), where the cells typically suffer from high oxygen and chemical exposures, it is possible that the enzyme has a protective function in cells. This assumption is supported by the recent finding that CYP2A6 oxidises bilirubin ─ a potent antioxidant at low intracellular concentration but toxic at high concentration ─ to biliverdin which can be reduced back to bilirubin by biliverdin reductase when there is a depletion of intracellular bilirubin (Abu-Bakar et al, 2012).…”