Scientists Find Metabolic Switch which Could Lead to Obesity Treatment
Mechanism found that decides whether we burn or store fat
Obesity has been a health issue for decades and it is said that one-third of Americans are obese. This can lead to health risks such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol and some forms of cancer.
This also comes at a great cost in healthcare too and it's not just a US problem. In the UK it affects one in every four adults.
There are many reasons this can occur from lower-income families not having the resources to buy more healthy food, from not being in the right environment that encourages a healthy and active lifestyle, genetics or even just down to medical reasons.
A recent study has been done where we may be able to start controlling the switch that says to store fat or burns it.
The article below may not be the easiest of reads so just take it slowly
The strongest association with obesity resides in a gene region known as "FTO," which has been the focus of intense scrutiny since its discovery in 2007. However, previous studies have failed to find a mechanism to explain how genetic differences in the region lead to obesity.
"Many studies attempted to link the FTO region with brain circuits that control appetite or propensity to exercise," says first author Melina Claussnitzer, a visiting professor at CSAIL. "Our results indicate that the obesity-associated region acts primarily in adipocyte progenitor cells in a brain-independent way."
To recognize the cell types where the obesity-associated region may act, the researchers used annotations of genomic control switches across more than 100 tissues and cell types. They found evidence of a major control switchboard in human adipocyte progenitor cells, suggesting that genetic differences may affect the functioning of human fat stores.
To study the effects of genetic differences in adipocytes, the researchers gathered adipose samples from healthy Europeans carrying either the risk or the non-risk version of the region. They found that the risk version activated a major control region in adipocyte progenitor cells, which turned on two distant genes, IRX3 and IRX5.
Control of thermogenesis
Follow-up experiments showed that IRX3 and IRX5 act as master controllers of a process known as thermogenesis, whereby adipocytes dissipate energy as heat, instead of storing it as fat.
Thermogenesis can be triggered by exercise, diet, or exposure to cold, and occurs both in mitochondria-rich brown adipocytes that are developmentally related to muscle, and in beige adipocytes that are instead related to energy-storing white adipocytes.
"Early studies of thermogenesis focused primarily on brown fat, which plays a major role in mice, but is virtually nonexistent in human adults," Claussnitzer says. "This new pathway controls thermogenesis in the more abundant white fat stores instead, and its genetic association with obesity indicates it affects global energy balance in humans."
The researchers predicted that a genetic difference of only one nucleotide is responsible for the obesity association.
In risk individuals, a thymine (T) is replaced by a cytosine (C) nucleobase, which disrupts repression of the control region and turns on IRX3 and IRX5. This then turns off thermogenesis, leading to lipid accumulation and ultimately obesity.
Success in human and mouse cells
The researchers showed that they could indeed manipulate this new pathway to reverse the signatures of obesity in both human cells and mice.
Similarly, repression of IRX3 in mouse adipocytes led to dramatic changes in whole-body energy balance, resulting in a reduction of body weight and all major fat stores, and complete resistance to a high-fat diet.
"By manipulating this new pathway, we could switch between energy storage and energy dissipation programs at both the cellular and the organismal level, providing new hope for a cure against obesity"
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