Abstract
Gastro‐intestinal diseases such as Crohn's disease and colon cancer have increasingly been shown to involve disruption of fusion and fission pathways linking cell growth and metabolism. Increased cell stress, Reactive Oxidative Species (ROS), and dysregulated lipid homeostasis may result from the disruption of mitochondrial dynamics. The objective of this research is to identify transcription level changes in mitochondrial fusion and fission genes within enterocytes in response to the increased metabolic load during dietary lipid absorption. Preliminary data from our lab show ultrastructural changes within enterocytes as lipid is absorbed from the lumen of the intestine. In these experiments, mitochondria increase in size presumably through fission events. Additionally, we observed an increase in apposition events between mitochondria and lipid droplets following an egg yolk diet. To investigate these phenomena, we compared dissected intestines of six days post‐fertilization zebrafish (Danio rerio) larvae after a high‐fat meal of 1 mM oleic acid and 1 mM oleic acid with cholesterol. After three hours of feeding with either diet, dissected intestines were processed for extraction of total RNA. Isolated RNA was then amplified with Qiagen RT2 Profiler Array ™ specific for zebrafish mitochondrial genes. Our results show 3.3 and 1.28 fold upregulation of the mitochondrial fusion genes Opa1 and Mfn2, respectively, in the presence of oleic acid and a 1.42 fold upregulation in FIS1 in the presence of cholesterol. These data support the hypothesis that mitochondrial fusion genes play a role in the processing of dietary fat within enterocytes.Support or Funding InformationResearch reported in this presentation was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM103434 to the West Virginia IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (WV‐INBRE).This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.
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