In silico analysis to link insulin resistance, obesity, and ageing with Alzheimer’s disease
Abstract The process of ageing accompanies several metabolic diseases. With ageing, fats accumulate to increase the visceral and abdominal adiposity leading to hyperinsulinemia, insulin resistance, obesity and several other diseases. Drosophila melanogaster is often used to study the ageing process and its related disorders. Therefore in this study, we performed an in silico analysis to relate the process of ageing and insulin resistance. We analyzed data of insulin resistant drosophila from GEO database and compared it with the data from the literature survey. We observed that 98 genes were common in both the models, and they showed gene modulations related to metabolic pathways, fatty acid metabolism, insulin resistance, and neural receptor-ligand binding pathways. Analysis of the REACTOME database against human data revealed that TRKB signalling pathway is commonly affected. TRKB mediated BDNF pathway is a major regulator of memory loss. We further analyzed the common genes in Alzheimer's disease and compared the fly data with human data to identify the diseases related to these common genes. Then we performed a literature survey to provide protective mechanisms for TRKB signalling pathway activation, mediated through polyphenols. We treated the flies with sesamol conjugated lipoic acid derivative (a phenolic compound) at hormetic doses to evaluate its effect on the memory of flies.