Insulin Resistance in Hibernating Brown Bears
For this project, we sampled transcriptomes from adipose, liver, and muscles tissue samples from brown bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) during hibernation before and after dextrose feeding. Some some subjects were fed dextrose and others were not. The goal was to disentangle the effects of hibernation in insulin sensitivity / insensitivity in brown bears to gain a better understanding of how bears' tissues become insulin resistant during hibernation and how they return to normal after emerging from hibernation. The tissues were analyzed for differences in gene expression. We were specifically interested in insulin response pathways in key metabolic tissues between the two groups.