Abstract

Numerous studies have examined how both negative and positive maternal exposures (environmental contaminants, nutrition, exercise, etc.) impact offspring risk for age-associated diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and others. The purpose of this study was to introduce the foreskin as a novel model to examine developmental programming in human neonates, particularly in regard to adipogenesis and insulin receptor signaling, major contributors to age-associated diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Neonatal foreskin was collected following circumcision and primary dermal fibroblasts were isolated to perform adipocyte differentiation and insulin stimulation experiments. Human neonatal foreskin primary fibroblasts take up lipid when stimulated with a differentiation cocktail and demonstrate insulin signaling when stimulated with insulin. Thus, we propose that foreskin tissue can be used to study developmental exposures and programming that occur in the neonate as it relates to age-associated diseases such as obesity and diabetes.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2017

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Experimental Gerontology, v. 94, p. 93-98.

© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This manuscript version is made available under the CC‐BY‐NC‐ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

The document available for download is the author's post-peer-review final draft of the article.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2016.12.015

Funding Information

Funding was provided by the Graduate Center for Nutritional Sciences at the University of Kentucky (K.J.P.) and the National Institutes of Health (R01ES022223 to C.J.M). Leryn Reynolds was supported by an American Heart Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship (15POST25110002). Brett Dickens was supported by a CCTS Professional Student Mentored Research Fellowship.

Download

Share

COinS