Abstract
Nowadays, one of the biggest problems in healthcare is an obesity epidemic. Consumption of cheap and low-quality energy-rich diets, low physical activity, and sedentary work favor an increase in the number of obesity cases within many populations/nations. This is a burden on society, public health, and the economy with many deleterious consequences. Thus, studies concerning this disorder are extremely needed, including searching for new, effective, and fitting models. Obesity may be related, among other factors, to disrupting adipocytes activity, disturbance of metabolic homeostasis, dysregulation of hormonal balance, cardiovascular problems, or disorders in nutrition which may lead to death. Because of the high complexity of obesity, it is not easy to find an ideal model for its studies which will be suitable for genetic and physiological analysis including specification of different compounds’ (hormones, neuropeptides) functions, as well as for signaling pathways analysis. In recent times, in search of new models for human diseases there has been more and more attention paid to insects, especially in neuro-endocrine regulation. It seems that this group of animals might also be a new model for human obesity. There are many arguments that insects are a good, multidirectional, and complex model for this disease. For example, insect models can have similar conservative signaling pathways (e.g., JAK-STAT signaling pathway), the presence of similar hormonal axis (e.g., brain–gut axis), or occurrence of structural and functional homologues between neuropeptides (e.g., neuropeptide F and human neuropeptide Y, insulin-like peptides, and human insulin) compared to humans. Here we give a hint to use insects as a model for obesity that can be used in multiple ways: as a source of genetic and peptidomic data about etiology and development correlated with obesity occurrence as well as a model for novel hormonal-based drug activity and their impact on mechanism of disease occurrence.
Highlights
Besides Insulin-like peptides (ILPs), adipokinetic hormones are one of the most important insect neuropeptides involved in regulation of insect metabolism
These authors showed that the activin type I receptor Baboon (Babo) autonomously increases adipokinetic hormones (AKHs) signaling without affecting ILP signaling in the fat body via, at least, increase of AkhR expression
Crz interacts through neuronal pathways with AKH producing cells, but might regulate trehalose levels acting as a hormone on fat body cells [89,114]
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Lnk plays a similar role as SH2B1 in insulin and IGF-1 signaling [14,15] Another example of homology between mammalian and insect gene is HMGCR responsible for encoding 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase (in insects it is called HMGCR) which in both mammals and insects is responsible for regulation of processes correlated with cholesterol production, as it catalyzes mevalonate, a substrate for cholesterol biosynthesis [16,17]. The argument for usage of insects as a model for human diseases are similarities between signaling pathways, e.g., Toll/Dif (in which the main role is played by the Toll receptor which resembles the mammalian Toll-like receptor (TLRs), and the Spätzle protein, for which the mammalian analogue is called nerve growth factor (NGF) or interleukin 17F). In the case of insect peptides we use the nomenclature of Coast and Schooley [22]
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