Female and Male C57Bl/6J Offspring Exposed to Maternal Obesogenic Diet Develop Altered Hypothalamic Energy Metabolism in Adulthood

Purpose: Study a cohort of C57Bl/6J dams, treated with a control or high-fat-high-sugar diet, and their adult offspring to explore potential hypothalamic mechanisms to explain the link between maternal and offspring obesity. Hypothalamic differential gene expression analysis was conducted following next-generation sequencing (NGS) and analyzed in Ingenuity Pathway Analysis. This methodology was supplementary to in vivo studies which characterized offspring metabolic phenotype. Methods: Total RNA was extracted from a subset of offspring hypothalamus tissue using a RNeasy Mini Kit (Qiagen, Germantown, MD). Tissues were homogenized in RLT buffer using mechanized syringe homogenization. RNA was assessed for purity and concentration using the NanoDrop (NanoDrop Technologies). Approximately 4ug of total RNA was used to generate cDNA by reverse transcription using a cDNA synthesis kit (Applied Biosystems, Carlsbad, CA). Results: There were 31,637 differentially expressed genes in adult OB offspring hypothalamus compared with control diet. Of the identified differentially expressed genes, there were 2510 differentially expressed genes that were significantly different between CON and OB offspring (Supplemental Table 3). In OB offspring, 65% of the identified differentially expressed genes were downregulated whereas 35% were upregulated. Conclusions: Collectively, data demonstrate that maternal obesity without diabetes is associated with adiposity and decreased hypothalamic energy production. Hypothalamus mRNA profiles of 4-month old C57Bl/6J mice exposed to maternal control and obesogenic diets