Dale S Edgerton
Vanderbilt University, TN·Physiology
After a meal, the liver must switch from making glucose to soaking it up from the blood. This switch helps keep blood sugar normal, and it breaks down in people heading toward diabetes.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biochemistry
- Topics
glucose metabolism
hepatic glucose uptake
hepatic glucose production
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Determine how peripheral insulin delivery, which mimics injected insulin used by people with diabetes, affects liver glucose metabolism in dogs fed a high-fat, high-fructose diet, compared with insulin entering through the hepatic portal vein.
- Measure how insulin, glucose and the portal glucose signal, a nerve-based cue triggered when gut-absorbed glucose reaches the liver, interact to control mealtime liver glucose uptake in diet-impaired dogs.
- Examine how a high-fat, high-fructose diet alters the liver's handling of amino acids and protein, and how this interacts with liver glucose metabolism, using portal vein nutrient infusions.
- Test whether high glucagon levels work together with insulin to clear ingested amino acids from the blood and lower glucose under physiological conditions in dogs.
More about the research
A diet high in fat and fructose, often called a Western diet, severely impairs the liver's ability to take up glucose. This project asks how that diet disrupts the liver's handling of sugar and protein, and how different treatment strategies might help.
Why it matters
Western-style diets high in fat and fructose contribute to obesity, glucose intolerance and diabetes, a costly cause of disability and death. Learning how these diets impair the liver, and whether delivering insulin preferentially to the liver works better, could inform new treatment approaches for metabolic disorders. The dog model may help bridge findings from cells and rodents to people.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rita Basu
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Medicine & Clinical Research
Map the daytime pattern of liver glucose production after meals in adults with type 2 diabetes using a stable-isotope triple-tracer approach, while estimating insulin action and beta-cell responsiveness.
Bethany Cummings
University of California-Davis, CA·Physiology
Compare liver and islet responses to injected glucagon in obese mice and after dietary or bariatric-surgery weight loss, to test whether α-cell signaling shifts from the liver to insulin secretion.
Jonathan Campbell
Duke University, NC·Physiology
Test whether pericytes, cells lining blood vessels, are the main GIP receptor (GIPR)-expressing cells in fat tissue, using mouse models that mark and lineage-trace GIPR-positive cells over time.
The school
Vanderbilt University: 22 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 494 research doctorates a year.
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