Obesity prevalence among American adults is approximately 36.5% and is closely associated with several chronic metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Caloric dense high-fat diets remain one of the leading causes of obesity. Adipose tissues, known to have fat storage function, are now identified as a dynamic endocrine organ which controls several metabolic functions such as insulin sensitivity, energy homeostasis and hunger. Changes in structure, composition and secretory function in adipose tissues due to obesity are still remaining as an exciting research area. Furthermore, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is also often found in adults suffering from obesity. Histological investigations, commonly employed to study fat accumulation in tissues, use a number of chemical fixatives and deparaffinizing agents that alter lipid profiles. Cryosectioning of tissues preserves lipids though it needs to be optimized based on many factors such as type of tissue and environment conditions. Fourier transformed infrared microspectroscopic imaging (FTIRI) reveals structural and compositional variations of tissues simultaneously without staining. In this work, our objectives are to 1) optimize cryosectioning of liver, white and brown adipose tissues harvested from mice fed low-fat and high-fat diets and 2) use FTIRI to identify changes in lipid, nucleic acids and protein content and their distribution in tissues. Principal component analysis of IR spectra extracted from FTIR images and statistical comparison of peak areas (assigned to lipid, protein and nucleic acid) reveal that the composition of liver and adipose tissues significantly changes with the diet.

FTIR microspectroscopy imaging reveals changes in adipose tissues and liver induced by high-fat diet

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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