ADIPOQ and obesity due to melanocortin 4 receptor deficiency: Liu et al. (2010) had found that the vasoactive intestinal peptide pathway was significantly correlated with BMI and fat mass, suggesting that this pathway plays an important role in the development of obesity. Our previous studies also revealed that the Rac1pathway was associated with the obesity-related phenotype plasma adiponectin (Li et al., 2015).