Your parents don't only give you their genes but their habits...

Paternal high-fat diet consumption induces common changes in the transcriptomes of retroperitoneal adipose and pancreatic islet tissues in female rat offspring

1. Sheau-Fang Ng*,§, 
2. Ruby C. Y. Lin†, 
3. Christopher A. Maloney*,
4. Neil A. Youngson*, 
5. Julie A. Owens∥ and 
6. Margaret J. Morris*,¹

1. ^*Department of Pharmacology, School of Medical Sciences, ^†Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, and School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia;
2. ^§Department of Paediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, National University of Malaysia, Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and
3. ^∥School of Paediatrics and Reproductive Health, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

1. Correspondence: Department of Pharmacology, School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2052. E-mail:m.morris@unsw.edu.au

Abstract

We previously showed that paternal high-fat diet (HFD) consumption programs β-cell dysfunction in female rat offspring, together with transcriptome alterations in islets. Here we investigated the retroperitoneal white adipose tissue (RpWAT) transcriptome using gene and pathway enrichment and pathway analysis to determine whether commonly affected network topologies exist between these two metabolically related tissues. In RpWAT, 5108 genes were differentially expressed due to a paternal HFD; the top 5 significantly enriched networks identified by pathway analysis in offspring of HFD fathers compared with those of fathers fed control diet were: mitochondrial and cellular response to stress, telomerase signaling, cell death and survival, cell cycle, cellular growth and proliferation, and cancer. A total of 187 adipose olfactory receptor genes were down-regulated. Interrogation against the islet transcriptome identified specific gene networks and pathways, including olfactory receptor genes that were similarly affected in both tissues (411 common genes, P<0 .05="" a="" and="" cancer="" cell="" common="" cycle="" em="" gene="" highlight="" hub="" in="" molecular="" nbsp="" network="" particular="" same="" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;" the="" we="" with="">Myc

, suggesting early onset developmental changes that persist, shared responses to programmed systemic factors, or crosstalk between tissues. Thus, paternal HFD consumption triggers unique gene signatures, consistent with premature aging and chronic degenerative disorders, in both RpWAT and pancreatic islets of daughters.—Ng, S.-F., Lin, R. C., Maloney, C. A., Youngson, N. A., Owens, J. A., Morris, M. J. Paternal high-fat diet consumption induces common changes in the transcriptomes of retroperitoneal adipose and pancreatic islet tissues in female rat offspring.