Transcriptome profiling of control and TNFalpha treated HepG2 cells

The proinflammatory cytokine, TNFalpha is critical in maintaining liver homeostasis since it is a major determiner of hepatocyte life and death. Considering this, gene transcription profiling was examined in control and TNFalpha treated HepG2 cells. Results indicated that TNFalpha could significantly alter the expression of a significant number of genes; most of them were functionally distributed among molecular functions like catalytic activity, binding, molecular transducer activity, transporter activity, translation and transcription regulator activities or enzyme regulator activity. Also, within genes up-regulated by TNFalpha, several GO terms related to lipid and fat metabolism were significantly overrepresented indicating global dysregulation of fat metabolism within the hepatocyte and those within the down-regulated dataset included genes involved in immunoglobulin receptor activity and IgE binding thereby indicating a compromise in immune defense mechanism(s) apart from those involved the DNA binding and protein binding categories. The interacting network of lipid metabolism, small molecule biochemistry was derived to be significantly affected that correlated well with the top canonical pathway of biosynthesis of steroids and molecular and cellular function of lipid metabolism. All these indicate TNFalpha to be significantly altering the transcriptome profiling within HepG2 cells with genes involved in lipid and steroid metabolism being the most favoured. This study suitably addresses the genes that determine TNFalpha mediated alterations within the hepatocyte mainly the phenotypes of hepatic steatosis and fatty liver that are associated with several hepatic pathological states.

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Pandey AK, Munjal N, Datta M