Expression of genes associated with inflammation and iron metabolism in 3T3-L1 cells induced with macrophages-conditioned medium, glucose and iron

Abstract

© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Obesity is characterized by a chronic inflammatory process, with an increased volume of total adipose tissue, especially visceral, which secretes pro-inflammatory cytokines such as TNF-α and IL-6. Hepcidin (Hpc), a main iron metabolism regulator, is synthetized by an IL-6 stimuli, among others, in liver and adipose tissue, favoring an association between the inflammatory process and iron metabolism. Still there are questions remain regarding the interaction of these factors. Our aim was to study the effect of a macrophage-conditioned medium (MCM) on adipocyte cells challenged with glucose and/or iron. We studied the mRNA relative abundance of genes related to inflammation in differentiated 3T3-L1 cells challenged with Fe (40 µM), glucose (20 mM) or Fe/glucose (40 µM/20 mM) with or without MCM for 24 h. We also measured the intracellular iron levels under these conditions. Our results showed that when adipocytes were