Presenter: Peter Ellsworth
Authors: Peter Ellsworth, Jared Carter, Adelyn Christensen, Jacob Herring, Jeremy Saito, Jeffery Tessem
Faculty Advisor: Jeffery Tessem
Institution: Brigham Young University
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is a chronic disease that affects millions of people. Symptoms include weight gain, impaired glucose tolerance, and impaired insulin secretion. The Nr4a3 knock out (KO) mouse recapitulates many of these symptoms, with elevated blood glucose levels, impaired glucose tolerance, impaired insulin secretion, and increased adiposity on a standard chow diet. Nr4a3 is a nuclear receptor that controls gene expression of targets essential for fuel metabolism and respiration. Measuring mitochondrial respiration rates of various Nr4a3 KO tissues demonstrates a significant impairment of respiration in adipose tissue.These data demonstrate that Nr4a3 plays a crucial role in controlling mitochondrial respiration only in adipose tissue, but the direct Nr4a3 targets responsible for this phenotype have not been defined. I hypothesize that Nr4a3 plays a key role in mitochondrial respiration by affecting proteins found in the electron transport chain.