Principal Investigator Harvey Lodish
This project is focused on the transcriptional regulation of global glucose and lipid metabolism by adiponectin; she wants to determine the important signaling and metabolic pathways affected by the deficiency of adiponectin and, more particularly, to identify the specific transcription factors involved in these regulations. To this end she used second- generation technologies to sequence total mRNA isolated from the liver of adiponectin knockout mice and compared the expression profiles with those of wild-type mice. She confirmed the changes in expression of critical genes by real-time PCR. Qingqing has identified several important pathways that are severely downmodulated by the absence of adiponectin, and currently she is using several computational and experimental techniques to identify the transcription factors responsible for changed expression of these groups of genes. The goal of her study is to identify the specific transcription factors involved in regulating glucose and lipid metabolism, as they are the potential therapeutic targets in the treatments of obesity induced diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.