Pantothenic acid alleviates fat deposition and inflammation by preventing JNK/P38 MAPK signaling pathway

Abstract

Abstract Excessive fat deposition leads to obesity and cardiovascular diseases with abnormal metabolism. Pantothenic acid (PA) is a major B vitamin required for energy metabolism. However, the effect of PA on lipid metabolism and obesity has not been explored. We investigated the effects and molecular mechanism of PA on fat accumulation as well as the influence of adipogenic marker genes in both adult male mice and primary adipocytes. Firstly, we demonstrated that PA attenuates weight gain in mice fed high-fat diet (HFD). Besides, PA supplementation substantially improved glucose tolerance and lipid metabolic disorder in obese mice. Furthermore, PA significantly inhibited WAT deposition as well as fat droplets magnification in both chow and HFD group. More importantly, PA obviously suppressed the mRNA levels of CD36,IL-6 and TNF-α to alleviate inflammation and reduced the levels of PPARγ, aP2 and C/EBPαgenes that related to lipid metabolism in ing-WAT and epi-WAT. In vitro, PA supplementation shown a lower lipid droplet aggregation as well as reduced expression levels of adipogentic genes. Finally, we identified that PA inhibits the phosphorylation levels of p38 and JNK in murine primary adipocytes. Collectively, Our data for the first time illustrated that PA attenuates lipid metabolic disorder as well as fat deposition by JNK/p38 MAPK signaling pathway.