Deriving at candidate genes of metabolic stress from pancreas of WNIN/GR-Ob mutant rats

Abstract

Development of appropriate animal model systems have greatly helped our understanding of the basic mechanism(s) of several degenerative diseases. WNIN/GR-Ob - a mutant rat strain developed at the National Center for Laboratory Animal Sciences facility of National Institute of Nutrition, is a new animal model ideal to study the metabolic syndrome since it is obese with impaired glucose tolerance and also exhibits several secondary complications. The present study was performed in the pancreas of this mutant model to assess the global gene expression (microarray) to assess the transcriptome level changes in situ depicting inflammation, obesity, IR and diabetes in these animals. Our findings suggest an interplay of several confounding factors in pancreas which include inflammation/macrophage infiltration/apoptosis/oxidative and endoplasmic reticulum stress, all contributing for the shift toward pro-inflammation. We were able to phenotypically correlate the metabolic alterations vis-a-vis candidate genes (array analyses) compared between mutants and its age matched, parental controls. We advocate that the data reported here would provide a suitable insight in to the pathophysiology of metabolic syndrome. © 2013 Landes Bioscience.