New research by the Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has revealed the genetic determinants of fat storage in cells, which may lead to a new understanding of and potential treatments for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. While scientists have long understood that lipid droplets contribute to fat build up in cells, the genes involved in droplet biology have been a focus of extensive research.
In a study published in Nature, scientists in the laboratories of Drs. Robert V. Farese, Jr., of Gladstone and UCSF, and Peter Walter, of UCSF, devised a genetic screen to identify genes responsible for fat storage in cell of fruit flies, and potentially other species.
"For some time, we have been studying the enzymes that make fats," said Dr. Farese, senior investigator. "But clearly, we need to know a lot more about the most basic processes that regulate cellular fat storage to be able to make progress on some very serious human diseases."
To identify novel genes involved in fat storage, GICD scientist Dr. Yi Guo, and Dr. Tobias Walter, formerly of Dr. Walter's laboratory and now of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany, initiated a major discovery project, in which they used RNAi screens to individually inactivate all the genes in cells from fruit flies. Basic cellular processes in humans are highly conserved in cells from fruit flies, so the results should mostly be applicable to human biology. Drs. Guo and Walther completed the initial survey and have now begun to study in detail the genes that have the most striking effects on fat storage in cells.