The influence of pharmacogenetics on fatty liver disease in the Wistar and Kyoto rats: A combined transcriptomic and metabonomic study

Although fatty liver disease is caused by a number of toxicological insults and the metabolic syndrome, the exact mechanisms by which many of these pathophysiological stimulii induce fatty liver are unknown. The rapid and profound steatosis caused by orotic acid, resulting from an impairment in the production of ApoB, has been investigated in the Wistar strain rat using a combined transcriptomic and metabonomic/metabolomic approach. Analysis of liver tissue from rats exposed to orotic acid for 1, 3, and 14 days was performed by DNA microarrays and high resolution H-1 NMR spectroscopy based metabonomics of both tissue extracts and intact tissue (n = 3). Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and principal components analysis, used as a data reduction tool to visualize the most perturbed transcripts and metabolites. Orotic acid produced a profound 8-fold increase in total lipids, and in particular increases in resonances associated with polyunsaturated fats (CHCH and CH2CHCH groups). This was accompanied by increases in the concentrations of trimethylamine-oxide (TMAO), betaine, choline, and phosphocholine, as well as a relative decrease in glucose and glycogen. At the transcriptional level, perturbations were detected in both oxidative stress and osmoregulation/pH homeostasis. However, this contrasts with a previous transcriptomic/metabolic study of fatty liver disease in a combined data set of Wistar (out-bred) and Kyoto (in-bred) strains of rats, with only 4 transcripts being found to be in common between the two analyses. This emphasizes the need to understand how strain background interacts with a given toxic lesion or genetic modification.