Gene expression profiling reveals distinct features of various porcine adipose tissues

BACKGROUND: The excessive accumulation of body fat is a major risk factor to develop a variety of metabolic diseases. To investigate the systematic association between the differences in gene expression profiling and adipose deposition, we used pig as a model, and measured the gene expression profiling of six variant adipose tissues in male and females from three pig breeds which display distinct fat level. RESULTS: We identified various differential expressed genes among breeds, tissues and between sexes, and further used a clustering method to identify sets of functionally co-expression genes linked to different obesity-related phenotypes. Our results reveal that the subcutaneous adipose tissues mainly modulate metabolic indicators, nonetheless, the visceral adipose tissues as well as the intermuscular adipose tissue were mainly associated with the impaired inflammatory and immune response. CONCLUSIONS: The present study provided the evidence of gene expression profiling that the subcutaneous adipose tissues are mainly affected the metabolism process, whereas the visceral and intermuscular adipose tissues should been term as the metabolic risk factors of obesity.