Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 8|pp 11043—11060

High expression of CD52 in adipocytes: a potential therapeutic target for obesity with type 2 diabetes

Rui Mao¹, Fan Yang², Yu Zhang¹, Hongtao Liu¹, Pengsen Guo¹, Yanjun Liu¹, Tongtong Zhang^1,³

¹The Center of Gastrointestinal and Minimally Invasive Surgery, The Third People’s Hospital of Chengdu, Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China
²Emergency Department, Third Clinical Medical College, Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
³Medical Research Center, The Third People’s Hospital of Chengdu, The Second Chengdu Hospital Affiliated to Chongqing Medical University, Chengdu 610031, China

* Equal contribution

Received: November 24, 2020Accepted: February 3, 2021Published: March 11, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202714

Copyright: © 2021 Mao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the involvement of CD52 in adipocytes as well as to explore its effect on type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and to improve our understanding of the potential molecular events of obesity with type 2 diabetes. Global changes in the CD52 expression patterns were detected in adipocytes and preadipocytes derived from obese and lean individuals. In particular, CD52 was identified as significantly differentially upregulated and was analyzed, both in vitro and in vivo, using various approaches. In vitro experiments, CD52 was a significantly up-regulated mRNA in mature adipocytes and preadipocytes. In addition, CD52 gradually increased with the differentiation of preadipocytes. In vivo experiments, the expression of CD52 in high-fat diet (HFD) -fed mice tended to be higher than that in regular diet (RD) -fed mice. Further analysis showed that CD52 expression was positively correlated with Smad3 and TGF-β in mice, and the downregulation of CD52 was accompanied by increased glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity. Moreover, a comparison of CD4+CD52^high T cells and CD4+CD52^low T cells showed that many T2DM-related genes were aberrantly expressed. Overall, CD52 may functioned as an important potential target for obesity with T2DM via TGF-β/Smad3 axis.