Human APOE3 expressing mice are more prone to develop fatty liver disease on a high fat and sugar diet compared to APOE4 mice

Recent findings suggest that the human APOE epsilon 4 allele protects against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, while APOE epsilon 3 promotes hepatic steatosis and steatohepatitis. We performed an untargeted proteome analysis of the liver and identified a great number of proteins differently expressed in obese APOE3 and APOE4 mice. The majority of the proteins up-regulated in APOE3 can be grouped to inflammation and damage-associated response, cytoskeleton and lipid storage. In contrast, those proteins that are up-regulated in APOE4 can be related to intermediate filament modifications, biotransformation and amino acid metabolism. Results of the targeted quantitative RT-PCR and Western blot experiments contribute to the overall finding that APOE3 promotes hepatic steatosis, inflammatory- and damage-associated response signaling and fibrosis in the liver of obese mice. One of the proteins that were up-regulated in obese as well as lean APOE4 compared to APOE3 mice is parvulin 14 (Pin4). Up-regulation of parvulin 14 may be involved in the protection against fatty liver disease evident in the presence of APOE4.