Effect of environmental stress responsive transcription factor ATF5 on adipogenesis

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Obesity is a risk factor of metabolic syndrome including diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia. Obesity is caused by an excessive adipocytes and related to the cell growth and differentiation of adipocytes. On the other hand, I have found that ATF5 mRNA levels decreases to 30% according to the adipocyte differentiation. This suggests that ATF5 might have a significant function on the adipocyte differentiation. I have found that ATF5 mRNA expression is up-regulated by a variety of stresses. This shows that changes of ATF5 expression by the stresses might disturb the expression patterns of the target genes for ATF5 and leads to the pathological status. Until now, the genes whose expression are regulated by ATF5 are unknown. The exploration of those genes is one of the useful ways for elucidating the functions of ATF5. I planed to knock down the expression of ATF5 in adipocyte using SiRNA technique, and compare the expression pattern of a variety of genes between in knockdown cells and in control cells with DNA microarray analysis. At first, I tried to produce the effective SiRNA for ATF5 expression. I checked the effeciency of the SiRNA using the cells which transfected with the flag-ATF5 exprerssion plasmid, the expression of flag-ATF5 protein was effectively repressed. Furthermore, to express ATF5 in cells exogenously, I tried to construct the adeno virus vector.