Obesity and its related complications have emerged as global health problems; however, the pathophysiological mechanism of obesity is still not fully understood. In this study, C57BL/6J mice were fed a normal (ND) or high-fat diet (HFD) for 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 20, and 24 weeks and the time course was systemically analyzed specifically for the hepatic transcriptome profile. Genes that were differentially expressed in the HFD-fed mice were clustered into 49 clusters and further classified into 8 different expression patterns: long-term up-regulated (pattern 1), long-term down-regulated (pattern 2), early up-regulated (pattern 3), early down-regulated (pattern 4), late up-regulated (pattern 5), late down-regulated (pattern 6), early up-regulated and late down-regulated (pattern 7), and early down-regulated and late up-regulated (pattern 8) HFD-responsive genes. Within each pattern, genes related with inflammation, insulin re-sistance, and lipid metabolism were extracted, and then, a protein-protein interaction network was generated. The pattern specific sub-network was as follows: pattern 1, cellular assembly and organization, and immunological di-sease, pattern 2, lipid metabolism, pattern 3, gene expression and inflammatory response, pattern 4, cell signaling, pattern 5, lipid metabolism, molecular transport, and small molecule biochemistry, pattern 6, protein synthesis and cell-to cell signaling and interaction and pattern 7, cell-to cell signaling, cellular growth and proliferation, and cell death. For pattern 8, no significant sub-networks were iden- tified. Taken together, this suggests that genes involved in regulating gene expression and inflammatory response are up-regulated whereas genes involved in lipid metabolism and protein synthesis are down-regulated during diet-induced obesity development.

Keywords: hepatic genes, microarry, nutrigenomics, obesity