Effect of High Fat Diet on Intestinal Gene Expression in Hamster

Next-generation sequencing and big data analysis were used to investigate the high-fat diet on gene expression level of intestinal tissues in hamster. Sixteen hamsters were assigned to the con-trol group and the high-fat group, respectively. At week 12, the high-fat group was switched from high-fat to the control diet. At weeks 4, 8, 12, and 20, two hamsters from each group were sacrificed for analysis. The results showed that 51~328 genes exhibited more than a twofold change in expression level in high-fat diet group at week 4, 8, 12. Subsequently, Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) was used to analyze the relative gene expression levels. We found that significantly increased expression levels of genes associated with cell apoptosis, oxidative stress, inflammation, and cell proliferation compared to the control group. At week 20, the high-fat group still exhibited gene expressions related to lipid biosynthesis, DNA methylation, and transcriptional repression signaling, but concurrently, several regulatory mechanisms for damage repair were activated in intestinal epithelial cells, including Glutathione-mediated detoxification and nucleotide excision repair. This study demonstrated that the gene expressions at stopping the intake of high fat diet were similar to those of long-term high-fat feeding, but it was accompanied with upregulation of repair genes.