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Genetics and Genomics

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Obesity

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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Exploring Β-Cell Function And Heterogeneity In Obese Sm/J Mice, Mario Alejandro Miranda Aug 2021

Exploring Β-Cell Function And Heterogeneity In Obese Sm/J Mice, Mario Alejandro Miranda

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pancreatic β-cells perform glucose-stimulated insulin secretion, a process required to maintain systemic glucose homeostasis. Obesity promotes glycemic and inflammatory stress, causing β-cell death and dysfunction, resulting in diabetes. Efforts to improve β-cell function in obesity have been hampered by observations that β-cells are highly heterogeneous, varying in morphology, function, and gene expression. There is great need to understand the breadth of β-cell heterogeneity in health and obesity to improve diabetic therapies.High fat-fed SM/J mice spontaneously transition from hyperglycemic-obese to normoglycemic-obese with age, providing a unique opportunity to study β-cell adaptation. Here, we show that as they resolve hyperglycemia, obese SM/J …


The Good, The Brown, And The Healthy: Understanding Non-Thermogenic Brown Adipose Function In Obese Mice, Caryn Nicole Carson Aug 2020

The Good, The Brown, And The Healthy: Understanding Non-Thermogenic Brown Adipose Function In Obese Mice, Caryn Nicole Carson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Genetic and environmental factors heavily intertwine to affect metabolic homeostasis. To tease out the exact interactions between these two realms of influence, researchers often compare how one or multiple different inbred mouse strains react to various diets. An observation consistently seen across multiple strains on the same diet can reasonably be considered a general dietary effect, whereas an observation seen only in one strain of mice is more likely to result from a genetic cause or gene-by-environment interaction. Similarly to humans, a high fat diet causes many mouse strains to develop obesity and poor metabolic health, with varying degrees of …