Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Adipose tissue (AT) plays a central role in obesity-related complications such as cardiovascular diseases, insulin resistance, and type two diabetes. A comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying adipocyte formation is of both fundamental and clinical relevance. It has been reported that UPR pathway, IRE1α-XBP1 regulates hepatic lipogenesis and the role of this pathway in adipogenesis in murine adipocytes has also been confirmed. Our tea...

Mitochondria are essential for synthesising ATP required for cellular metabolism. Mitochondria are able to alter their morphology and abundance through the balance of fission and fusion genes. T2DM is often accompanied by a metabolic syndrome within the individual. The aim of my PhD is to investigate whether metabolic dysregulation in T2DM can be linked to dysfunction within their mitochondria.Declaration of funding: EPSRC....

The anti-diabetic drug, metformin, is associated with progressive decrease in serum vitamin B12 levels whereas vitamin B12 deficiency is related to increased insulin resistance and dyslipidaemia by altered methylation. As the risk of vitamin B12 deficiency is increased among metformin users, it is of utmost importance to examine how metformin response in vitamin B12 deficient population.We investigated the cellular mechanism of metformin in vitamin B12 i...

Background: Vitamin B12 (B12) insufficiency is common in pregnancy and independently predicts insulin resistance (IR) in the offspring. B12 is an important key nutrient for epigenetic programming through regulating DNA methylation. Such B12 DNA methylation may influence leptin, a strong candidate for methylation, which could impact both insulin resistance (IR) and associated neonatal metabolic risk. Therefore, we hypothesize that leptin can be programmed by maternal B12 which ...

Mitochondria are essential for synthesising ATP required for cellular metabolism. In response to changes in their cellular environment, mitochondria are able to alter their morphology and abundance through the balance of “fusion” and “fission” events. The aim of this study was to profile the expression of mitochondrial genes in the abdominal subcutaneous (AbSc) adipose tissue (AT) of lean, obese and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) individuals and determine ...

Background: In obesity, excess nutrients and an increased demand for protein synthesis contribute to unfolded proteins accumulating within the endoplasmic reticulum and consequent activation of unfolded protein response (UPR). UPR in adipose tissue (AT) is critical to the initiation and integration of inflammation and insulin signalling pathways in obese and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. The aim of this study was to examine whether novel malabsorptive or bypass bar...

Background: Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress in adipose tissue (AT) is critical to the initiation and integration of inflammation and insulin signalling pathways in obese and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients. It induces an unfolded protein response (UPR) to restore functional integrity which leads to upregulation of three master regulators of ER; PKR-like ER-regulated kinase (PERK), inositol requiring enzyme1α (IRE1α) and activating transcription factor6 (AT...