White adipose tissue (WAT) is a central factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. Despite the epidemiological importance of WAT there is a paucity of translational models to study long term changes in mature adipocytes. Here, we describe a novel method for the culture of mature white adipocytes under a permeable membrane. Compared to existing culture methods such as adipose tissue explants and adipocyte ceiling culture, Membrane mature Adipocyte Aggregate Cultures (MAAC) are superior at maintaining adipogenic gene expression through 2 weeks of culture, do not dedifferentiate, and are under reduced hypoxic stress relative to adipose tissue explants. Unbiased RNA-Sequencing analysis indicates that the gene expression profile of MAAC in culture for 1 or 2 weeks is more similar to starting patient material than cultured adipose tissue explants, floating adipocytes, or in vitro-differentiated precursors from the same donor, with the fewest number of differentially expressed genes and the smallest fold-change in gene expression. Importantly, adipocytes from lean and obese patients can be cultured as MAAC, as can subcutaneous and visceral adipocytes, while maintaining depot-specific gene expression signatures. MAAC remain fully functional after long term culture, with similar responses to insulin and lipolytic stimuli compared to recently isolated cells. In addition, MAAC maintain the ability to crosstalk with other cell types, producing synergistic increases in IL6 and IL8 when co-cultured with macrophages, and respond robustly and predictably to diverse pharmacological agonism. Together, these abilities make MAAC a powerful tool for studying phenotypic changes in mature adipocytes, crosstalk between adipocytes and other cell types, and provide an improved translational model for drug development for the modulation of adipose tissue function.
Overall design: mRNA profiles of packed D0 cells from patient material, whole fresh tissue, not-differentiated preadipocytes (PA), and cultured cells in 1 and 2 week, such as membrane mature adipocyte aggregate culture (MAAC) cells, floating cells, explant cells, differentiated PA were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina NextSeq.
Submitter declares that raw data will not be submitted due to patient privacy concerns and European Union legislation.
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