Figure 1.

A western diet promotes mouse liver cancer development and elicits distinct hepatic gene expression profiles

(A) Summary of the experimental mouse liver cancer model and tissue sampling times in this study. Mice at two weeks of age were injected with the carcinogen diethylnitrosamine (DEN). Starting at the time of weaning, mice were fed a western diet (WD), or a matched control diet (CD). At 36 weeks of age mice were culled and liver tissue was harvested for RNA-sequencing.

(B) Cumulative tumor size of three DEN^CD mice and four DEN^WD mice at 30 and 36 weeks of age measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Tumor burden in DEN^WD mice increases significantly more over time than that in DEN^CD mice (paired t-test, p value <0.05).

(C) Principal component analysis (PCA) of gene expression data derived from RNA-Sequencing analysis of tissue samples described in panel A.

(D) Gene ontology (GO) biological process over-representation test for differentially expressed genes using the enrichGO function and visualised with the dotplot function from the clusterProfiler package. For each comparison, the bottom condition is used as baseline. Benjamini-Hochberg correction was used with a q-value cut-off of 0.01 and is represented by dot color. Dot size represents the fractional number of genes enriched within a particular biological process compared to the total gene set size.