MC1R and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis: Furthermore, using RNA sequencing data from human liver biopsies (Govaere et al., 2020), we found that hepatic MC1R expression was significantly downregulated (log2 fold change = −1.1) in patients with NAFLD or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) compared to control cases (Figure 1E).