RESEARCH ARTICLE Depot Dependent Effects of Dexamethasone on Gene Expression in Human Omental and Abdominal Subcutaneous Adipose Tissues from Obese Women R. Taylor Pickering1☯, Mi-Jeong Lee1☯, Kalypso Karastergiou1, Adam Gower2, Susan K. Fried1* 1 Obesity Center, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, United States of America, 2 Clinical Translational Sciences Institute, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States of a11111 America ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. *
[email protected] Abstract OPEN ACCESS Glucocorticoids promote fat accumulation in visceral compared to subcutaneous depots, Citation: Pickering RT, Lee M-J, Karastergiou K, Gower A, Fried SK (2016) Depot Dependent Effects but the molecular mechanisms involved remain poorly understood. To identify long-term of Dexamethasone on Gene Expression in Human changes in gene expression that are differentially sensitive or responsive to glucocorticoids Omental and Abdominal Subcutaneous Adipose in these depots, paired samples of human omental (Om) and abdominal subcutaneous Tissues from Obese Women. PLoS ONE 11(12): (Abdsc) adipose tissues obtained from obese women during elective surgery were cultured e0167337. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167337 with the glucocorticoid receptor agonist dexamethasone (Dex, 0, 1, 10, 25 and 1000 nM) for Editor: Marià Alemany, University of Barcelona, 7 days. Dex regulated 32% of the 19,741 genes on the array, while 53% differed by Depot Faculty of Biology, SPAIN and 2.5% exhibited a Depot*Dex concentration interaction. Gene set enrichment analysis Received: June 10, 2016 showed Dex regulation of the expected metabolic and inflammatory pathways in both Accepted: November 11, 2016 depots. Cluster analysis of the 460 transcripts that exhibited an interaction of Depot and Dex Published: December 22, 2016 concentration revealed sets of mRNAs for which the responses to Dex differed in magni- Copyright: © 2016 Pickering et al.