The effects of moderate weight gain in adipose tissue gene expression in metabolically-normal (MNO) and metabolically-abnormal (MAO) subjects

Obesity is associated with insulin resistance and increased intrahepatic triglyceride (IHTG) content, which are key risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. However, a subset of obese people does not develop these metabolic complications. We tested the hypothesis that MNO, but not MAO, people are protected from the adverse metabolic effects of weight gain. To this end, global transcriptional profile in adipose tissue before and after weight gain was evaluated by microarray analyses. We collected subcutaneous adipose tissue samples from MNO (n=11) and MAO (n=7) subjects before and after moderate (~6%) weight gain (total 36 samples). We evaluated the effects of weight gain on adipose tissue gene expression in both MNO and MNO subjects.We used the GeneChip Human Gene 1.0 ST array (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA, USA).