Dietary sulfur amino acid restriction elicits a cold-like transcriptional response in inguinal but not epididymal white adipose tissue of male mice
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Introduction
About 1 billion people are living with obesity worldwide. GLP-1-based drugs have massively transformed care, but long-term consequences are unclear in part due to reductions in energy expenditure with ongoing use. Diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT) and cold exposure (CE) raise EE via brown adipose tissue (BAT) activation and beiging of white adipose tissue (WAT). Methionine restriction (MetR) is a candidate DIT trigger, but its EE effect has not been benchmarked against CE, nor have their tissue-level interactions been defined.
Objective & Methods
In a 2×2 design (Control vs. MetR; room temperature, RT: 22 °C vs. CE: 4 °C for 24 h), we used male C57BL/6N mice to benchmark MetR-induced thermogenesis against CE and mapped how diet and temperature interact across tissues. Bulk RNA-seq profiled liver, iBAT, iWAT, and eWAT. Differential expression was modeled with main effects and a diet×temperature interaction; KEGG GSEA assessed pathways.
Results
MetR increased EE at RT and shifted fuel use toward lipid oxidation, supporting MetR as a bona fide DIT factor. CE elevated EE across diets and blunted diet differences. Transcriptomic responses were tissue-specific: in liver, CE dominated gene induction while MetR and CE cooperatively repressed genes. The combination enriched glucagon/AMPK-linked and core metabolic pathways. In iBAT, CE dominated thermogenic and lipid-oxidation programs with minimal MetR contribution. In iWAT, MetR and CE acted largely additively with high concordance, enhancing fatty-acid degradation, PPAR signaling, thermogenesis, and TCA cycle pathways. In eWAT, robust co-dependent differential expression emerged only with MetR+CE, yet pathway-level enrichment was limited.
Conclusion
MetR is a genuine DIT stimulus that remodels metabolism in a tissue-specific manner. Our study provides a tissue-resolved transcriptomic resource that benchmarks diet-induced (MetR) against cold-induced thermogenesis and maps their interactions across liver, iBAT, iWAT, and eWAT.
