Transcriptomic analysis of visceral adipose from healthy and diabetic obese subjects

Abstract

Understanding the role of visceral fat accumulation in the occurrence and progression of metabolic syndrome is of considerable interest. In order to understand the difference between visceral tissue biology of healthy and unhealthy obese individuals, we have used microarray profiling to compare genome-wide expression differences between visceral adipose tissue biopsies obtained from obese diabetics, and those from age and body mass index (BMI) matched normal glucose tolerance subjects. Whereas genes upregulated in diabetics showed enrichment of natural killer cell mediated cytotoxicity, the downregulated genes showed enrichment of biosynthesis of unsaturated fatty acids. Given the known inhibitory effect of unsaturated fatty acids on inflammation and natural killer cell number or activity, our results suggest that visceral inflammation resulting from decreased levels of unsaturated fatty acids may underlie progression of diabetes in obese individuals.

Molecular insights into the role of white adipose tissue in metabolically unhealthy normal weight and metabolically healthy obese individuals

“…These findings reinforce the idea that WAT inflammation increases cardiometabolic risk and that this can be independent of body weight. Another study reported an up‐regulation of natural killer cell‐mediated cytotoxicity genes and a decreased expression of genes involved in the biosynthesis of unsaturated fatty acids in VAT from obese women with T2D compared with MHO women (83). The authors of this study proposed that VAT inflammation may promote the development of T2D by reducing the levels of unsaturated fatty acids.…”

Autonomic Dysfunction in Asian Indian T2DM Patients is Related to Body Fat Content Instead of Insulin Resistance: A DEXA Study

“…Therefore, dysmetabolism in them might be related to qualitative factor rather than quantity and distribution of fat. In a recent study of genome wide gene expression profiling of visceral adipose tissue of obese diabetic women, it was observed that diabetes is associated with qualitative adipose tissue change, decreased unsaturated fatty acid pathway and NK cell mediated heightened inflammation [34][35].…”

Novel targets for the development of drugs for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

“…To test the latter, we compared mRNA array data and proteomics data from 3T3L1 adipocytes and LPS-stimulated co-cultures of 3T3L1 adipocytes and RAW264.7 macrophages (Figure 2). For most of the genes that showed a difference in mRNA expression in diabetic versus non-diabetic obese women, we also observed a difference in mRNA expression in our in vitro model, suggesting that differences found between our in vitro proteomics data and the in vivo mRNA data from Mathur et al (2013) is mainly because of differences between mRNA versus protein expression.…”

“…Of note, not all of the 54 newly identified proteins, whose expression changed in our in vitro T2DM inflammatory model, showed an altered gene expression in the T2DM obese subjects compared to healthy obese subjects in the in vivo study on obese Indian women (Mathur et al 2013). This could be due to differences between human versus mouse, in vivo versus in vitro or simply protein versus mRNA expression.…”

“…To further identify whether the protein hits from our mass spec analysis are relevant as biomarkers for human studies, we analyzed a publicly available human gene expression data set of visceral adipose tissue of 10 Indian obese women (Mathur et al 2013). Five of these subjects were healthy obese and five were indicated as having T2DM.…”