Skip Navigation



Human Molecular Genetics Advance Access [Accepted Manuscript] published online on October 16, 2009
Human Molecular Genetics, doi:10.1093/hmg/ddp476
This Article
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Supplementary Data
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Leonardson, A. S.
Right arrow Articles by Schadt, E. E.
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Leonardson, A. S.
Right arrow Articles by Schadt, E. E.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© 2009 The Author(s)
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The effect of food intake on gene expression in human peripheral blood

Amy S. Leonardson1,{dagger}, Jun Zhu1,{dagger}, Yanqing Chen1, Kai Wang1, John R. Lamb1, Marc Reitman2, Valur Emilsson1,* and Eric E. Schadt1,*

1 Rosetta Inpharmatics, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., 401 Terry Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109, USA 2 Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Merck & Co., Inc., 126 E. Lincoln Avenue, Rahway, NJ 07065-0900, USA

* Address correspondence to: Valur Emilsson (valur_emilsson{at}merck.com) or Eric E. Schadt (eric.schadt{at}gmail.com)

Received June 24, 2009; Revised September 9, 2009; Accepted October 12, 2009

Human gene expression traits have been shown to be dependent on gender, age, and time of day in blood and other tissues. However, other factors that may impact gene expression have not been systematically explored. For example, in studies linking blood gene expression to obesity related traits, whether the fasted or fed state will be the most informative is an open question. Here we employed a two-arm cross-over design to perform a genome-wide survey of gene expression in human peripheral blood to address explicitly this type of question. We were able to distinguish expression changes due to individual and time-specific effects from those due to food intake. We demonstrate that the transcriptional response to food intake is robust by constructing a classifier from the gene expression traits with >90% accuracy classifying individuals as being in the fasted or fed state. Gene expression traits that were best able to discriminate the fasted and fed states were more heritable and achieved greater coherence with respect to pathways associated with metabolic traits. The connectivity structure among gene expression traits was explored in the context of coexpression networks. Changes in the connectivity structure were observed between the fasted and fed states. We demonstrate that differential expression and differential connectivity are two complementary ways to characterize changes between fasted and fed states. Both gene sets were significantly enriched for genes associated with obesity related traits. Our results suggest that the pair of fasted/fed blood expression profiles provide more comprehensive information about an individual's metabolic states.

{dagger} These authors contributed equally.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.