Ellen Grehan
Research Mentor(s): Sriram Chandrasekaran
Mentor Department: Biomedical Engineering
Authors:
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Presentation Type: Poster 40
Abstract
Our research seeks to analyze the metabolic alterations between 5 genetically defined clusters of Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). While the clusters have been previously shown to be uniquely associated with various outcomes and phenotypes, their biological mechanisms are poorly understood. To help further our understanding of how each cluster contributes to the development of T2D, we generated tissue-specific metabolic models (adipose, skeletal muscle, kidney, liver, and pancreas) for individuals in the GTEx database. We calculated the metabolic fluxes for the reactions present in those tissues. For each tissue-cluster pair, I compared individuals in the top and bottom 20% of each cluster partitioned polygenic risk score (pPS) and looked for statistically different metabolic fluxes at both the reaction and pathway levels. Our results showed that there appears to be a difference in metabolic pathways between subjects that have differing polygenic risk scores for type-2 diabetes clusters. These findings, compounded with the larger findings of the study, could help improve the overall understanding of disease heterogeneity and further personalized treatment efforts.
