First Author | Stylianou IM | Year | 2005 |
Journal | Physiol Genomics | Volume | 20 |
Issue | 3 | Pages | 224-32 |
PubMed ID | 15598878 | Mgi Jnum | J:102227 |
Mgi Id | MGI:3607092 | Doi | 10.1152/physiolgenomics.00183.2004 |
Citation | Stylianou IM, et al. (2005) Microarray gene expression analysis of the Fob3b obesity QTL identifies positional candidate gene Sqle and perturbed cholesterol and glycolysis pathways. Physiol Genomics 20(3):224-32 |
abstractText | Obesity-related diseases are poised to become the primary cause of death in developed nations. While a number of monogenic causes of obesity have recently been identified, these are responsible for only a small proportion of human cases of obesity. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) studies using animal models have revealed hundreds of potential loci that affect obesity; however, few have been further analyzed beyond the original QTL scan. We previously mapped four QTL in an F(2) between divergently selected Fat (F) and Lean (L) lines. A QTL of large effect on chromosome 15 (Fob3) was subsequently mapped to a higher resolution into two smaller-effect QTL (Fob3a and Fob3b) using crosses between the F-line and a congenic line containing L-line alleles at the Fob3 QTL region. Here we report the gene expression characterization of Fob3b. Microarray expression analysis using the NIA-NIH 15K cDNA array set containing 14,938 mouse ESTs was employed to identify candidate genes and pathways that are differentially expressed between the F-line and a congenic line containing only the Fob3b QTL (Fob3b-line). Our study suggests squalene epoxidase (Sqle), a cholesterol biosynthesis enzyme, as a strong positional candidate gene for Fob3b. Several other cholesterol biosynthesis pathway genes unlinked to Fob3b were found to be differentially expressed, suggesting that a perturbation of this pathway could be in part responsible for the phenotypic difference between the F-line and Fob3b-line mice. |