The Study of Human Obesity Using Drosophila Melanogaster as an Animal Model

• Published in: The Korean Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology Vol. 46; no. 1; pp. 1 - 11
• Main Authors: Jung, Ji-Eun, Lee, Joo-Young, Lee, Ji-Hye
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 대한구강악안면병리학회 28.02.2022
• Subjects: 치의학
• ISSN: 1225-1577; 2384-0900
• DOI: 10.17779/KAOMP.2022.46.1.001

The increasing prevalence of obesity is associated with various metabolic diseases such as diabetes, posing significant social and economic burdens to the society. While obesity is a complex disease with multiple factors contributing to its pathophysiology, altered glucose and lipid metabolism is evident in obese patients as well as in animal models. Abnormal metabolic regulation often leads to development of insulin resistance, a hallmark of obesity-induced type 2 diabetes. In this review, we provide a brief overview of altered lipid metabolism manifested in the obese state. In addition, two representative animal models, Mus musculus and Drosophila melanogaster, are presented with experimental approaches adopted for generation and utilization of these models. More specifically, Drosophila has been widely used for studying the core physiological phenomena across phyla for decades, mostly due to the ease of handling and sophisticated genetic manipulations with conserved cell signaling pathways of reduced redundancy. Considering a significant degree of homology in Drosophila for human disease-associated genes, it poses as a versatile in vivo platform to study the pathophysiology of various human diseases. With core metabolic pathways governing energy homeostasis generally conserved, Drosophila can be used as a model for studying molecular mechanisms underlying disease phenotypes manifested in obese and diabetic patients. In this review, we discuss representative Drosophila studies that investigated the effects of dysregulated core signaling pathways on metabolic signatures of obese animals. KCI Citation Count: 0