CORRELATION BETWEEN SPEXIN GENE MUTATION AND IRAQI CHILDREN OBESITY

Abstract

Obesity is a real health problems all over the world and many causes may lead to it, such as genetic, nutrition, feeding behavior, metabolism, physical activity, medication or others. This research focused on the Genetic side of Iraqi children obesity by determination the role of spexin gene mutations and its hormone expression serum's level in obese children.Blood samples of 40 Healthy children volunteers aged between 6-12 years had been taken, 20 normal weight (control group) which their BMI ranged (21.34-20.41)kg /m2 and 20 obese group with BMI ranged between (24.22_22.04) kg/m2, and have a positive family history of obesity treated in the national center of obesity in Mosul. These samples were divided into two parts, whole blood and serum, whole blood had been used to extract the DNA and other analysis, while the serum used to estimate spexin hormone level. Theoretically spexin gene sequences from National Center for Biotechnology Information NCBI had been divided into four parts, then specific primers for each part had been designed, and used to amplified every parts, then10 sample of each obese and normal group had been randomly selected and submitted to sequencing protocol by utilizing (DNA sequencer 3730XL). Circulating serum's Spexin level was significantly decreased in obese children (1119.4)pg/ml compared with the normal weight group (4410.64) pg/ ml Transition and transvertion mutations 70% were observed in the spexin gene sequences DNA of obesity group,while no mutation were recorded in the control most of the spexin gene recorded mutation of the obese children observed in the 5 untranslated region 5UTR and 3untranslated region 3UTR.While in the normal weight children no change recorded in the spexin gene sequences compared with the NCBI sequences of this gene. six transition and three transversion mutations found in the 5UTR in addition to one transversion mutation in the 3UTR. These results confirmed that these mutation in spexin gene may affected spexin hormone expression making its serum's level very low in the obese children compared with its level in control's serum which had been one of many causes of Iraqi children's obesity.