Obtaining adipose tissue samples are paramount to the understanding of human obesity. We have examined the impact of needle-aspirated and surgical biopsy techniques on the study of subcutaneous adipose tissue (scAT) gene expression in both obese and lean subjects. Biopsy sampling methods have a significant impact on data interpretation and revealed that gene expression profiles derived from surgical tissue biopsies better capture the significant changes in molecular pathways associated with obesity. We hypothesize that this is because needle biopsies do not aspirate the fibrotic fraction of scAT; which subsequently results in an under-representation of the inflammatory and metabolic changes that coincide with obesity. This analysis revealed that the biopsy technique influences the gene expression underlying the biological themes commonly discussed in obesity (e.g. inflammation, extracellular matrix, metabolism, etc), and is therefore a caveat to consider when designing microarray experiments. These results have crucial implications for the clinical and physiopathological understanding of human obesity and therapeutic approaches.
Keywords: subject and tissue biopsy technique comparison
Overall design
Tissue samples from lean and obese subjects were analyzed: total of 36 hybridizations. The goal was to compare the effect of biopsy sampling methods on global subcutaneous adipose tissue gene expression analyses. The following subject groups were used for the analysis: 9 lean subjects: needle biopsy 9 lean subjects: surgical biopsy 9 obese subjects: needle biopsy 9 obese subjects: surgical biopsy
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