In order to fully understand the physiological functions of adipose tissue, especially its secretory functions, and to provide a basis for the identification of novel obesity related genes, the gene expression profiling of human visceral adipose tissue was established by using cDNA array. P-33-labelled cDNA, derived from visceral adipose tissue total RNA, was hybridized to a cDNA array containing over 16,000 expressed sequence-tagged clones which represent human singleton genes. The expressed sequence tag (EST) was considered to be expressed in visceral adipose tissue when the ratio of signal to noise was greater than or equal to 2. The results were analyzed with bioinformatics. Totally, 8230 genes were found to be expressed in visceral adipose tissue with 5200 known genes and 3030 known ESTs. Most of 84 secretory proteins, 120 receptors, and 74 transcription factors expressed in adipose tissue were newly identified. Many appetite-regulating related peptides or receptors and some reproduction-related genes were first found to be expressed in adipose tissue. Eight autocrine/paracrine systems were described for the first time in the visceral adipose tissue. These results clearly demonstrate that the visceral adipose tissue has important secretory functions and there is a complex local autocrine/paracrine regulatory network. The present work suggests that the visceral adipose tissue is an important component of the neuroendocrine-immune network and plays an important role in regulating appetite not only via endocrine but also via autocrine/paracrine systems. The visceral adipose tissue might also play a role in regulating reproduction and sexual function. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.