Background: Diabetes profoundly affects gene expression in organs such as heart, skeletal muscle, kidney and liver, with areas of perturbation including carbohydrate and lipid metabolism, oxidative stress, and protein ubiquitination. Type 1 diabetes impairs lung function, but whether gene expression alterations in the lung parallel those of other tissue types is largely unexplored.
Methods: Lung from a rat model of diabetes mellitus induced by streptozotocin was subjected to gene expression microarray analysis.
Results: Glucose levels were 67 and 260 mg/dl (p < 0.001) in control and diabetic rats, respectively. There were 46 genes with at least ± 1.5-fold significantly altered expression (19 increases, 27 decreases). Gene ontology groups with significant over-representation among genes with altered expression included apoptosis, response to stress (p = 0.03), regulation of protein kinase activity (p = 0.04), ion transporter activity (p = 0.01) and collagen (p = 0.01). All genes assigned to the apoptosis and response to stress groups had increased expression whereas all genes assigned to the collagen group had decreased expression. In contrast, the protein kinase activity and ion transporter activity groups had genes with both increased and decreased expression.
Conclusions: Gene expression in the lung is affected by type 1 diabetes in several specific areas, including apoptosis. However, the lung is resistant to changes in gene expression related to lipid and carbohydrate metabolism and oxidative stress that occur in other tissue types such as heart, skeletal muscle and kidney.