Stress Induced Obesidome - EAP 2017 Congress and MasterCourse, October 12-15, 2017, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Styliani Geronikolou ^1,2 Athanassia Pavlopoulou ⁴ Konstantinos Albanopoulos ³ Dennis Cokkinos ¹ George Chrousos ^1,2

¹Clinical, Translational, Experimental Surgery Research Center, Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens
²First Dpt of Pediatrics Aghia Sophia Children Hospital, Athens University Medical School
³First Dpt of Propedeutic Surgery, Hippokrateion Hospital, Athens University Medical School
⁴Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics, University of Thessaly

Background: The pathogenesis of chronic-stress related obesity epidemic includes effects on Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis released hormones, visceral fat accumulation as a result of chronic hypercortisolism, reactive insulin hyper secretion, low growth hormone secretion and hypogonadism. The dominant pathogenic mechanism is that of oxidative stress and research interest on antioxidant genes dominates the scientific community.

Aim: To construct an interactome of stress induced obesity, in the view of advancing the insight of the pathogenesis of the disease.

Methods: Obesity-related gene or gene products were extracted from the biomedical literature (Patterson and Abizaid, 2013, Qi and Cho, 2008). The interactions among them were investigated through STRING v10 (Szklarczyk et al., 2015), a database of known and predicted, physical and indirect associations among genes/proteins. In this study, a high confidence interaction score of 0.7-0.97 was selected.

Results: The intermediate nodes were also predicted, showing no more than 30 nodes of gene- gene products, illustrating known as well as predicted interactions (i.e. GHRL decreases UCP1 and UCP2 expression.

Conclusions: Interactions networks may help our better understanding of the pathogenesis of the disease. Moreover, CRH-AVP and INS (in the liver) are identified as major “hubs” for the stress induced (epigenetic) obesity.