Comparison of hepatic gene expression in response to fasting or 2 week high fat diet

The metabolic syndrome represents a cluster of well-documented risk factors for the development of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Next to visceral obesity, dyslipidemia and insulin resistance, excessive triglyceride accumulation in the liver has been implicated to play a role in the development of the metabolic syndrome. To investigate the underlying molecular changes leading to hepatic steatosis we performed microarray analysis on livers of mice either fasted over night or fed a high fat diet for 2 Weeks. We analysed 7 500 genes and subsequently performed a pathway analysis to identify changes in hepatic genes in both models. Fasting induced a high number of differentially expressed hepatic genes, resulting in an change towards an energy saving phenotype. In contrast only a small number of genes were differentially expressed after high fat diet. Fasting promoted gluconeogenesis and b-oxidation, strongly suppressed cholesterol synthesis and activated pathways to preserve hepatic function. High fat diet induced steatosis was accompanied by the activation of the stearoyl-CoA desaturase and the lipogenic transcription factor Srebp-1c, both implicated in the development of hepatic insulin resistance. These changes reflect the activation of different gene expression programs in response to plasma lipid overload. Keywords: Diet intervention Two conditions, fasting and high fat diet. 5 biological replicates for comparison of high fat diet versus fasting and controls versus high fat diet, 4 biological replicates for the comparison of controls versus fasting. All biological replicates are performed as technical replicates in the form of a dye-swap. Total number of arrays hybridises is therefore 28.