ABSTRACT: Tissue iron (Fe) overload is a frequent pathologic finding in multiple disease states including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), neurodegenerative disorders, cardiomyopathy, diabetes, and some forms of cancer. The role of iron, as a cause or consequence of disease progression and observed phenotypic manifestations, remains controversial. In addition, the impact of genetic variation on iron overload related phenotypes is unclear, and the identification of genetic modifiers is incomplete. Here, our aim was to characterize the genetic architecture of dietary iron overload and pathology using the Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel (HMDP), a panel of over 100 genetically distinct mouse strains optimized for genome-wide association studies and systems genetics. Dietary iron overload was induced by feeding male mice (114 strains, 6-7 mice per strain on average) a high iron diet for six weeks, and then tissues were collected at 10-11 weeks of age. Liver metal levels and gene expression were measured by ICP-MS and RNASeq, and lipids were measured by colorimetric assays. FaST-LMM was used for genetic mapping, and Metascape, WGCNA, and Mergeomics were used for pathway, module, and key driver bioinformatics analyses. Mice on the high Fe diet accumulated Fe in the liver, with a 6.5-fold difference across strain means. The iron loaded diet also led to a spectrum of copper deficiency and anemia, with liver copper levels highly correlated with red blood cell count, hemoglobin, and hematocrit. Hepatic steatosis of various severity was observed histologically, with 52.5-fold variation in triglyceride (TG) levels across the strains. TG and Fe mapped most significantly to an overlapping locus on chromosome 7 that has not been previously associated with either trait. Based on network modeling, significant key drivers for both Fe and TG accumulation are involved in cholesterol biosynthesis and oxidative stress management. To make the full data set accessible and useable by others, we have made our data and analyses available on a resource website.
