Yang Xu and Sam Trammell will present their work on Thrusday, January 19th 2012

Background for Yang Xu’s talk

Genome-Wide Mapping of Genetic Factors of Metabolic Syndrome in Rats

The metabolic syndrome, with prevalence about 25%, is one of the most dangerous diseases among US population. It is considered as “complex disease”, not only due to multiple genetic factors underlying the disease, but also its composite syndromes, including abdominal obesity, atherogenic dyslipidemia, elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or glucose intolerance, prothrombotic state and proinflammatory state. We use F2 intercross rats of Lyon Hypertensive (LH) and Lyon Normotensive (LN) as our animal model. LH rat is the ideal animal model because it shares many common features in metabolic syndrome with human. LN strain does not have any metabolic syndrome, which make it an ideal parental rat to cross with LH. At the same time, high similarity in genetics and apparent divergence in phenotypes between these two strains help narrow down chromosome regions linked with metabolic syndrome phenotypes and therefore, provides stronger power to detect suspected loci. To detect the connection between phenotypes and genotypes, we use QTL to locate chromosome regions highly suspected to be connected to physiological phenotypes. According to the risk factors of the disease, phenotypes of metabolic syndrome can be described into five groups:1) blood pressure; 2) body weight and length; 3) glucose; 4) hormones including triglyceides, cholesterol, insulin and leptin;5) visceral and back fat weight.  We find most disease linked loci locate at chr17.

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