News & Research

Research Description

Insulin resistance in skeletal muscle is a condition that is common to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Abnormal patterns of protein phosphorylation have been implicated in the pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes.  High through-put gene expression technologies such as microarrays are powerful tools for the study of physiological and pathological conditions with complex or multifactorial underlying mechanisms such as insulin resistance. However, microarray analysis provides no information about protein post-translational modifications. Proteomics offers a powerful approach for studying protein phosphorylation. However, no large scale in vivo human skeletal muscle phosphoproteome study has been reported so far.

The present project will analyze proteins isolated from muscle biopsies of lean healthy, obese nondiabetic and type 2 diabetic volunteers by state-of-the-art HPLC-nanospray-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-MS/MS) to determine global changes in protein phosphorylation under basal and insulin stimulated conditions. The central hypothesis of this investigation is that there are abnormal patterns of protein phosphorylation in insulin resistant human skeletal muscle as compared to lean and healthy conditions.

The overall goal is to identify molecular mechanisms responsible for insulin resistance in human skeletal muscle and to provide novel targets for prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes. The outcome of this proposed work will be the discovery of novel protein phosphorylation sites associated with insulin resistance and regulated by insulin that will expedite the generation of hypotheses to tackle the challenging issues of type 2 diabetes.

Research Profile

Mentor: Zhengping Yi  Undergraduate:  Rodney O’Neal Berry

What area of diabetes research does your project cover? What role will this particular project play in preventing, treating, and curing diabetes?

Our project covers the molecular mechanisms for the development of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.  By identifying the abnormal protein phosphorylation patterns in insulin resistant and type 2 diabetic participants, we provide novel targets to better understand  how people develop type 2 diabetes and provide leads for drug development to prevent and treat the disease.

If a person with diabetes were to ask you how your project will help them in the future, how would you respond?

New drugs may be developed for diabetic treatment based on our novel findings with more efficacy and less side effects. In addition, new drugs may be developed to prevent his/her child from developing diabetes.

Why is it important for you, personally, to become involved in diabetes research? What role will this award play in your efforts?

Currently there are approximately 26 million individuals in US have diabetes, and 79 million pre-diabetic individuals.  And these numbers are rising every year.  I do would like to contribute to the efforts to stop diabetes and to improve life of diabetic patients.

This award will help me to keep a bright and motivated African Black honor student to continue working on the clinical/translational project in my group.  He has shown strong interest in diabetes research and has made contributions to our research progress.

In what direction do you see the future of diabetes research going?

More team work from different scientific fields using a wide variety of technologies.