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US Scientists Identify Fat Precursor Cell, Discovery Could Explain Obesity
The finding, published online in this week's issue of the journal Cell, could also have implications for understanding how fat cells affect conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
"The identification of white adipocyte progenitor cells provides a means for identifying factors that regulate the proliferation and differentiation of fat cells," says senior author Jeffrey Friedman, who is the Marilyn M. Simpson Professor at Rockefeller and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Obesity, a major public health problem in the United States and increasingly in much of the Western world, results, in part, from an increase in the mass and number of white fat cells. Because white fat cells are post-mitotic, meaning that they cannot divide, scientists have hypothesized that a population of fat precursor cells must exist in the fat depot in order to produce new fat cells. But identifying these fat precursor cells has been difficult.
With the assistance of researchers in Rockefeller's Flow Cytometry Resource Center, first author Matt Rodeheffer, a postdoctoral associate in Friedman's Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, used a cell sorting technique called fluorescence-activated cell sorting, or FACS, to search for cell populations that could produce fat in cell cultures and identified two such populations.
To determine if these cells could develop into fat cells in living animals, Rodeheffer injected these cell populations into the fat depots of a genetically engineered mouse, developed at NIH, called fatless, which lacks white fat and mimics a condition in humans called lipodystrophy that also results in diabetes.
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