Humans and Mice Display Opposing Patterns of “Browning” Gene Expression in Visceral and Subcutaneous White Adipose Tissue Depots

Visceral adiposity is much more strongly associated with cardiometabolic disease in humans than subcutaneous adiposity. Browning, the appearance of brown-like adipocytes in the white adipose tissue (WAT), has been shown to protect mice against metabolic dysfunction, suggesting the possibility of new...

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Published inFrontiers in cardiovascular medicine Vol. 4; p. 27
Main Authors Zuriaga, Maria A., Fuster, Jose J., Gokce, Noyan, Walsh, Kenneth
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 05.05.2017
Subjects
adipose tissue
browning
Cardiovascular Medicine
gene expression
human
mouse
adipose tissue
browning
mouse
human
gene expression
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Summary:Visceral adiposity is much more strongly associated with cardiometabolic disease in humans than subcutaneous adiposity. Browning, the appearance of brown-like adipocytes in the white adipose tissue (WAT), has been shown to protect mice against metabolic dysfunction, suggesting the possibility of new therapeutic approaches to treat obesity and type 2 diabetes. In mice, subcutaneous WAT depots express higher levels of browning genes when compared with visceral WAT, further suggesting that differences in WAT browning could contribute to the differences in the pathogenicity of the two depots. However, the expression of browning genes in different WAT depots of human has not been characterized. Here, it is shown that the expression of browning genes is higher in visceral than in subcutaneous WAT in humans, a pattern that is opposite to what is observed in mice. These results suggest that caution should be applied in extrapolating the results of murine browning gene expression studies to human pathophysiology.
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Edited by: Mengwei Zang, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, USA
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Cardiovascular Metabolism, a section of the journal Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine
Reviewed by: Jeonga Kim, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA; Yu Li, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (CAS), China
ISSN:2297-055X
2297-055X
DOI:10.3389/fcvm.2017.00027