Chen Lei, Zhang Yu-Hang, Li JiaRui, Wang ShaoPeng, Zhang YunHua, Huang Tao, Cai Yu-Dong
School of Life Sciences, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China.
Genes (Basel). 2017 Dec 18;8(12):392. doi: 10.3390/genes8120392.
The number of obesity cases is rapidly increasing in developed and developing countries, thereby causing significant health problems worldwide. The pathologic factors of obesity at the molecular level are not fully characterized, although the imbalance between energy intake and consumption is widely recognized as the main reason for fat accumulation. Previous studies reported that obesity can be caused by the dysfunction of genes associated with other diseases, such as myocardial infarction, hence providing new insights into dissecting the pathogenesis of obesity by investigating its associations with other diseases. In this study, we investigated the relationship between obesity and diseases from Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) databases on the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. The obesity genes and genes of one OMIM disease were mapped onto the network, and the interaction scores between the two gene sets were investigated on the basis of the PPI of individual gene pairs, thereby inferring the relationship between obesity and this disease. Results suggested that diseases related to nutrition and endocrine are the top two diseases that are closely associated with obesity. This finding is consistent with our general knowledge and indicates the reliability of our obtained results. Moreover, we inferred that diseases related to psychiatric factors and bone may also be highly related to obesity because the two diseases followed the diseases related to nutrition and endocrine according to our results. Numerous obesity-disease associations were identified in the literature to confirm the relationships between obesity and the aforementioned four diseases. These new results may help understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of obesity-disease co-occurrence and provide useful insights for disease prevention and intervention.
在发达国家和发展中国家，肥胖病例数量正在迅速增加，从而在全球范围内引发了严重的健康问题。尽管能量摄入与消耗之间的失衡被广泛认为是脂肪堆积的主要原因，但肥胖在分子水平上的病理因素尚未完全明确。先前的研究报告称，肥胖可能由与其他疾病（如心肌梗死）相关的基因功能障碍引起，因此通过研究肥胖与其他疾病的关联，为剖析肥胖的发病机制提供了新的见解。在本研究中，我们在蛋白质 - 蛋白质相互作用（PPI）网络上，从在线人类孟德尔遗传（OMIM）数据库中研究了肥胖与疾病之间的关系。将肥胖基因和一种OMIM疾病的基因映射到该网络上，并基于单个基因对的PPI研究这两个基因集之间的相互作用得分，从而推断肥胖与这种疾病之间的关系。结果表明，与营养和内分泌相关的疾病是与肥胖密切相关的前两种疾病。这一发现与我们的常识相符，并表明我们所得结果的可靠性。此外，根据我们的结果，我们推断与精神因素和骨骼相关的疾病也可能与肥胖高度相关，因为这两种疾病排在与营养和内分泌相关的疾病之后。文献中确定了许多肥胖 - 疾病关联，以证实肥胖与上述四种疾病之间的关系。这些新结果可能有助于理解肥胖 - 疾病共发的潜在分子机制，并为疾病预防和干预提供有用的见解。
