Is obesity a genetic disease? Human obese transcriptome analysis in monozygotic twins

ABSTRACT Obesity is a pandemic disease with a critical increase in childhood. An important unanswered question is to understand if this disease is due to genetic causes or to the life-style of the subjects. To address this question, we have analyzed if monozygotic twins show the same robust transcriptomic signature (5σ, as for the Higgs Boson) that we have recently revealed in obese subjects. Our results show that our signature correlates with BMI in paired transcriptomes of monozygotic twins, suggesting that the signature does not reflect underlying genetic causes.