Loss of CTRP10 results in female obesity with preserved metabolic health

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

Summary:
The manuscript by Chen et al. presents a detailed metabolic characterization of male and female WT and CTRP10 knockout mice. The main finding is that female KO mice become obese on both low-fat and high-fat diets but without evidence of marked insulin resistance, hepatic steatosis, dyslipidemia, or increased inflammatory markers. The authors performed a detailed transcriptomic analysis and identified differentially expressed genes that distinguish high-fat diet-fed CTRP10 KO from WT control mice. They further show that this set of genes exhibits cross-correlation in human tissues, and that this is greater in females than in males. The data indicate that the CTRP10 KO model may be useful to understand how obesity and metabolic dysfunction are coupled to each other, and how this occurs by a sex-biased mechanism.

Strengths:
The work presents a large amount of data, which has been carefully acquired and is convincing. The transcriptomic analysis will further help to define what pathways are associated with obesity, but not necessarily with metabolic dysfunction. The manuscript will be of interest to investigators studying metabolic diseases, and to those studying sex-specific differences in metabolic physiology. The limitations of the study are acknowledged, including that a whole-body knockout was used. The cause of the increased body weight is not entirely clear, despite the careful and detailed analysis that was performed. Notwithstanding these limitations, the phenotype is interesting, and this work will establish a basis for further work to understand the mechanisms that are involved.

Weaknesses:
Genes identified as DEGs in the mouse RNAseq data set were used to identify a set of human orthologous transcripts and the abundances of these transcripts were correlated with each other in Figure 10. This identified a greater correlation ("connectivity") in subQ adipose compared to other tissues, and in females compared to males. The description of how this analysis was done could be clearer. In some cases, the text refers to the software that was used without describing the goal of the analysis. In other instances, specialized terminology was used (e.g. "biweight midcorrelation") without defining what this means.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary:
In the current study, the authors investigated the role of loss of CTRP10 results in female obesity with preserved metabolic health. The overall conclusion is supported by the experimental data that CTRP10 negatively regulates body weight in females and that loss of CTRP10 results in benign obesity with largely preserved insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. The authors have shown the role of sex differences in the metabolically healthy obese (MHO) phenotype, which may increase the scope for research in this area.

Strengths:
The study provides a detailed idea of how genes are regulated in a sex-dependent manner.

Weaknesses:
Mechanistic details are missing.

Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

Summary:
This study examines the impact of CTRP10/C1QL2 absence on obesity and metabolic health in mice. Female mice lacking CTRP10 tend to develop obesity, particularly on a high-fat diet. Surprisingly, they do not display the typical metabolic traits associated with obesity, like fatty liver or glucose intolerance. This indicates a disconnection between weight gain and metabolic issues in these female mice. The research underscores the need to understand sex-specific factors in how obesity influences metabolic health.

Strengths:
The study provides compelling evidence regarding Ctrp10's role in female-specific metabolic regulation in mice, shedding light on its potential significance in metabolically healthy obese (MHO) individuals.

Weaknesses:
-The analysis and description of sex-specific human data require more details to highlight the relevance of Ctrp10 mouse data and the analysis of differentially expressed genes in humans.
-There's a lack of analysis regarding secreted Ctrp10 under various dietary conditions.
-The study didn't assess adipose tissue function to evaluate metabolic health.