Differences in the inflammatory proteome of East African and Western European adults and associations with environmental and dietary factors
- Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands
- Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, United Republic of Tanzania
- University of Bonn, Germany
- University of Florence, Italy
Abstract
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are rising rapidly in urbanizing populations in sub-Saharan Africa. Assessment of inflammatory and metabolic characteristics of a urbanizing African population and the comparison with populations outside Africa could provide insight in the pathophysiology of the rapidly increasing epidemic of NCDs, including the role of environmental and dietary changes. Using a proteomic plasma profiling approach comprising 92 inflammation-related molecules, we examined differences in the inflammatory proteome in healthy Tanzanian and healthy Dutch adults. We show that healthy Tanzanians display a pro-inflammatory phenotype compared to Dutch subjects, with enhanced activity of the Wnt/b-catenin signalling pathway and higher concentrations of different metabolic regulators such as 4E-BP1 and fibroblast growth factor 21. Among the Tanzanian volunteers, food-derived metabolites were identified as an important driver of variation in inflammation-related molecules, emphasizing the potential importance of lifestyle changes. These findings endorse the importance of the current dietary transition and the inclusion of underrepresented populations in systems immunology studies.
Data availability
Anonymized metadata of the Tanzanian participants and the circulating inflammation markers are available in an open access registry (DANS registry; https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xgx-zuht) Untargeted plasma metabolome data have been deposited to the EMBL-EBI MetaboLights database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/metabolights/); study identifier MTBLS2267.The source data of the proteomics analysis are provided in Supplemental Table 5.Publicly available databases used for this study include KEGG (https://www.genome.jp/kegg/), HMDB (https://www.hmdb.ca/) and ChEBI (https://ebi.ac.uk/chebi/). All other data is available in the main text and supplementary materials.
Article and author information
Author details
Andre J van der Ven
Funding
HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council (the Joint Programming Initiative,A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI-HDHL; project 529051018))
- Mihai G Netea
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Mauro Martins Teixeira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Ethics
Human subjects: Ethical statementThe study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical University College (CRERC) (No 2443) and the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR/HQ/R.8a/Vol. IX/2290 and NIMR/HQ/R.8a/Vol.IX/3318) in Tanzania. The 500FG cohort study was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, the Netherlands (NL42561.091.12, 2012/550). Subject recruitment and experimental procedures were conducted according to the principles mentioned in the Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects.
Version history
- Received: July 29, 2022
- Preprint posted: August 25, 2022 (view preprint)
- Accepted: August 8, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 9, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: September 1, 2023 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Temba et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Differences in the inflammatory proteome of East African and Western European adults and associations with environmental and dietary factors
eLife 12:e82297.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82297
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