Mitochondria associated markers in obese phenotype inferred from adipose tissue gene expression data

Abstract

Mitochondrial dysfunction was implicated in a diverse set of diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disease. Prior research showed that mitochondria may play a role in onset of obesity or obesity related metabolic complications. I have used three different analysis methods - differential gene expression analysis, differential gene gene correlation and co-expression network based analysis, in order to elucidate possible mechanism connecting mitochondrial function and obesity and to identify mitochondria related obesity markers. This resulted in a set of potential disease markers, which were further tested for their ability to differentiate between obese and non-obese samples by training a random forest classifier and testing it on an independent testing data set. The result of this analysis is a list of 25 mitochondria associated genes showing high importance in obese sample classification, along with a list of 80 genes identified as significant by more than one type of analysis and may therefore represent potential mitochondria associated obesity markers.