Publications by authors named "Erilynn Heinrichsen"

Article Synopsis
  • About 2 billion adults worldwide are overweight, with around 13% classified as obese, largely due to high-fat diets (HFD), which are linked to serious health issues like heart disease and diabetes.
  • Recent research highlights that HFD may also affect brain function and increase susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease, making studies in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) a useful model for understanding these issues.
  • In our analysis of male and female fruit flies on HFD versus a regular diet, we discovered distinct transcriptional responses, revealing that HFD impacts stress-related and lipid metabolism genes differently between genders, and correlates to increased eating behavior (hyperphagia).
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Obesity has dramatically increased in prevalence, making it essential to understand its accompanying metabolic changes. Modeling diet-induced obesity in Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies), we elucidated transcriptional and metabolic changes in w (1118) flies on a high-fat diet (HFD). Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics revealed altered fatty acid, amino acid, and carbohydrate metabolism with HFD.

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Obesity is associated with many diseases, one of the most common being obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which in turn leads to blood gas disturbances, including intermittent hypoxia (IH). Obesity, OSA and IH are associated with metabolic changes, and while much mammalian work has been done, mechanisms underlying the response to IH, the role of obesity and the interaction of obesity and hypoxia remain unknown. As a model organism, Drosophila offers tremendous power to study a specific phenotype and, at a subsequent stage, to uncover and study fundamental mechanisms, given the conservation of molecular pathways.

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