...has been recently identified as a member of the mitochondrial transporter superfamily. Identified and cloned in 1997, this gene is expressed in many tissues, including adipose tissues (Fleury et al. 1997; Gimeno et al. 1997). All members of this superfamily are located in the inner mitochondrial membranes. UCP2 mediates mitochondrial proton leakage, releasing energy stored within the proton motive force as heat. This ultimately results in a decrease in ATP synthesis. Therefore the UCP2 gene is a candidate gene for obesity and diabetes. Esterbauer et al. (2001) studied a common G/A polymorphism at position -866 of the promoter of UCP2 in an Austrian population. They concluded that the wild-type G allele is associated with reduced adipose tissue mRNA expression in vivo, reduced transcriptional activity in vitro, and an increased risk of obesity in middle-aged humans. The more common G allele has been shown to be associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes in obese middle-aged humans (Krempler et al. 2002). In another study Sesti et al. (2003) supported this association by showing that UCP2 -866G/A polymorphism contributes to variation in insulin secretion in glucose-tolerant subjects. However, Schauble et al. (2003) showed that UCP2 -866G/A polymorphisms were not associated with early-onset obesity in young subjects.

The effects of this SNP in different populations and ethnic groups is controversial (Esterbauer et al. 2001; Krempler et al. 2002; Schauble et al. 2003; Sesti et al. 2003; Ji et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2004). Racial differences are known to exist in the morbidity of obesity and diabetes mellitus. To the best of our knowledge, no report has been published on the frequency distribution of UCP2 -866G/A polymorphism in an Iranian population; thus we thought it would be interesting to determine whether or not the frequency distribution in Iran is different from that in other countries.

Subjects and Methods

Subjects. Seventy-five unrelated nonobese nondiabetic Iranian subjects were randomly selected for study. Subjects with the same family name were removed from the studied population. Subjects volunteered to participate in a study based on a MONICA/WHO project from a Tehran urban district population (Fakhrzadeh et al. 2005). This previous study recruited about 1,570 individuals...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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