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Obesity Issues

Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator

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The Changing Face of Obesity

Science tells us obesity is a chronic disease. Why does the outmoded and injurious notion that it is a problem of willpower persist?

By Joseph Proietto | November 1, 2015   http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44288/title/The-Changing-Face-of-Obesity/

In Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy the narrator meets a man named Ciacco who had been sent to Hell for the “Damning sin of Gluttony.” According to Catholic theology, in order to end up in Hell one must willfully commit a serious sin. So Dante believed that fat people chose to be fat. This antiquated view of the cause of obesity is still widespread, even among medical professionals. The consequences of this misconception are significant, because it forms the basis for the discrimination suffered by the obese; for the wasting of scarce resources in attempts to change lifestyle habits by public education; and for the limited availability of subsidized obesity treatments.

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While obesity is often labeled a lifestyle disease, poor lifestyle choices alone account for only a 6 to 8 kg weight gain. The body has a powerful negative feedback system to prevent excessive weight gain. The strongest inhibitor of hunger, the hormone leptin, is made by fat cells. A period of increased energy intake will result in fat deposition, which will increase leptin production. Leptin suppresses hunger and increases energy expenditure. This slows down weight gain. To become obese, it may be necessary to harbor a genetic difference that makes the individual resistant to the action of leptin.

Evidence from twin and adoption studies suggests that obesity has a genetic basis, and over the past two decades a number of genes associated with obesity have been described. The most common genetic defect in European populations leading to severe obesity is due to mutations in the gene coding for the melanocortin 4 receptor (MCR4). Still, this defect can explain severe obesity in only approximately 6 percent to 7 percent of cases (J Clin Invest, 106:271-79, 2000). Other genes have been discovered that can cause milder increases in weight; for example, variants of just one gene (FTO) can explain up to 3 kg of weight variation between individuals (Science, 316:889-94, 2007).

Genes do not directly cause weight gain. Rather, genes influence the desire for food and the feeling of satiety. In an environment with either poor access to food or access to only low-calorie food, obesity may not develop even in persons with a genetic predisposition. When there is an abundance of food and a sedentary lifestyle, however, an obesity-prone person will experience greater hunger and reduced satiety, increasing caloric intake and weight gain.

Since the 1980s, there has been a rapid rise in the prevalence of obesity worldwide, a trend that likely results from a variety of complex causes. There is increasing evidence, for example, that the development of obesity on individual or familial levels may be influenced by environmental experiences that occur in early life. For example, if a mother is malnourished during early pregnancy, this results in epigenetic changes to genes involved in the set points for hunger and satiety in the developing child. These changes may then become fixed, resulting in a tendency towards obesity in the offspring.

The biological basis of obesity is further highlighted by the vigorous defense of weight following weight loss. There are at least 10 circulating hormones that modulate hunger. Of these, only one has been confirmed as a hunger-inducing hormone (ghrelin), and it is made and released by the stomach. In contrast, nine hormones suppress hunger, including CCK, PYY, GLP-1, oxyntomodulin, and uroguanylin from the small bowel; leptin from fat cells; and insulin, amylin, and pancreatic polypeptide from the pancreas.

After weight loss, regardless of the diet employed, there are changes in circulating hormones involved in the regulation of body weight. Ghrelin levels tend to increase and levels of multiple appetite-suppressing hormones decrease. There is also a subjective increase in appetite. Researchers have shown that even after three years, these hormonal changes persist (NEJM, 365:1597-604, 2011; Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, 2:954-62, 2014). This explains why there is a high rate of weight regain after diet-induced weight loss.

Given that the physiological responses to weight loss predispose people to regain that weight, obesity must be considered a chronic disease. Data show that those who successfully maintain their weight after weight loss do so by remaining vigilant and constantly applying techniques to oppose weight regain. These techniques may involve strict diet and exercise practices and/or pharmacotherapy.

It is imperative for society to move away from a view that obesity is simply a lifestyle issue and to accept that it is a chronic disease. Such a change would not only relieve the stigma of obesity but would also empower politicians, scientists and clinicians to tackle the problem more effectively.

Joseph Proietto was the inaugural Sir Edward Dunlop Medical Research Foundation Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine, Austin Health at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is a researcher and clinician investigating and treating obesity and type 2 diabetes.

A Weighty Anomaly

Why do some obese people actually experience health benefits?

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan | November 1, 2015     http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44304/title/A-Weighty-Anomaly/

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THE ENDOCRINE THEORY: Some researchers have posited that fat cells may secrete molecules that affect glucose homeostasis in muscle or liver tissue.COURTESY OF MITCHELL LAZAR

In the early 19th century, Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet was obsessed with a shape: the bell curve. While helping with a population census, Quetelet proposed that the spread of human traits such as height and weight followed this trend, also known as a Gaussian or normal distribution. On a quest to define a “normal man,” he showed that human height and weight data fell along his beloved bell curves, and in 1823 devised the “Quetelet Index”—more familiar to us today as the BMI, or body mass index, a ratio of weight to height.

Nearly two centuries later, clinicians, researchers, and fitness instructors continue to rely on this metric to pigeonhole people into categories: underweight, healthy, overweight, or obese. But Quetelet never intended the metric to serve as a way to define obesity. And now, a growing body of evidence suggests these categories fail to accurately reflect the health risks—or benefits—of being overweight.

Although there is considerable debate surrounding the prevalence of metabolically healthy obesity, when obesity is defined in terms of BMI (a BMI of 30 or higher), estimates suggest that about 10 percent of adults in the U.S. are obese yet metabolically healthy, while as many as 80 percent of those with a normal BMI may be metabolically unhealthy, with signs of insulin resistance and poor circulating lipid levels, even if they suffer no obvious ill effects. “If all we know about a person is that they have a certain body weight at a certain height, that’s not enough information to know their health risks from obesity,” says health-science researcher Paul McAuley of Winston-Salem State University. “We need better indicators of metabolic health.”

The dangers of being overweight, such as a higher risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other complications, are well known. But some obese individuals—dubbed the “fat fit”—appear to fare better on many measures of health when they’re heavier. Studies have found lower mortality rates, better response to hemodialysis in chronic kidney disease, and lower incidence of dementia in such people. Mortality, it’s been found, correlates with obesity in a U-shaped curve (J Sports Sci, 29:773-82, 2011). So does extra heft help or hurt?

To answer that question, researchers are trying to elucidate the metabolic reasons for this obesity paradox.

In a recent study, Harvard University epidemiologist Goodarz Danaei and his colleagues analyzed data from nine studies involving a total of more than 58,000 participants to tease apart how obesity and other well-known metabolic risk factors influence the risk of coronary heart disease. Controlling these other risk factors, such as hypertension or high cholesterol, with medication is simpler than curbing obesity itself, Danaei explains. “If you control a person’s obesity you get rid of some health risks, but if you control hypertension or diabetes, that also reduces health risks, and you can do the latter much more easily right now.”

Danaei’s team assessed BMI and metabolic markers such as systolic blood pressure, total serum cholesterol, and fasting blood glucose. The three metabolic markers only explained half of the increased risk of heart disease across all study participants. In obese individuals, the other half appeared to be mediated by fat itself, perhaps via inflammatory markers or other indirect mechanisms (Epidemiology, 26:153-62, 2015). While Danaei’s study was aimed at understanding how obesity hurts health, the results also uncovered unknown mechanisms by which excess adipose tissue might exert its effects. This particular study revealed obesity’s negative effects, but might these unknown mechanisms hold clues that explain the obesity paradox?

Other researchers have suggested additional possibilities—for example, that inflammatory markers such as TNF-α help combat conditions such as chronic kidney disease, or that obesity makes a body more capable of making changes to, and tolerating changes in, blood flow depending on systemic needs (Am J Clin Nutr, 81:543-54, 2005).

According to endocrinologist Mitchell Lazar at the University of Pennsylvania, the key to explaining the obesity paradox may be two nonexclusive ways fat tissue is hypothesized to function. One mechanism, termed the endocrine theory, suggests that fat cells secrete, or don’t secrete enough of, certain molecules that influence glucose homeostasis in other tissues, such as muscle or liver. The first such hormone to be discovered was leptin; later studies reported several other adipocyte-secreted factors, including adiponectin, resistin, and various cytokines.

The other hypothesis, dubbed the spillover theory, suggests that storing lipids in fat cells has some pluses. Adipose tissue might sequester fat-soluble endotoxins, and produce lipoproteins that can bind to and clear harmful lipids from circulation. When fat cells fill up, however, these endotoxins are stashed in the liver, pancreas, or other organs—and that’s when trouble begins. In “fat fit” people, problems typically linked to obesity such as high cholesterol or diabetes may be avoided simply because their adipocytes mop up more endotoxins.

“In this model, one could imagine that if you could store even more fat in fat cells, you could be even more obese, but you might be protected from problems [associated with] obesity because you’re protecting the other tissues from filling up with lipids that cause problems,” says Lazar. “This may be the most popular current model to explain the fat fit.”

Although obesity greatly increases the risk of type 2 diabetes—up to 93-fold in postmenopausal women, for example—not all obese people suffer from the condition. Similarly, a certain subtype of individuals with “normal” BMIs are at greater risk of developing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes than others with BMIs in the same range. Precisely what distinguishes these two cohorts is still unclear. “Just as important as explaining why some obese people don’t get diabetes is to explain why other subgroups—normal-weight people or those with lipodystrophy—sometimes get it,” Lazar says. “If there are multiple subtypes of obesity and diabetes, can we figure out genetic aspects or biomarkers that cause one of these phenotypes and not the other?”

To Lazar, McAuley, and other researchers, it’s increasingly evident that BMI may not be that metric. Finding better ways to assess a healthy weight, however, has proven challenging. Researchers have tested measures, such as the body shape index (ABSI) or the waist-hip ratio, which attempt to gauge visceral fat—considered to be more metabolically harmful than fat in other body locations. However, these metrics have yet to be implemented widely in clinics, and few are as simple to understand as the BMI (Science, 341:856-58, 2013).

Independent of metrics, however, the health message regarding weight is still unanimous: exercise and healthy dietary choices benefit everyone. “At a certain point, despite all the so-called fit-fat people, the demographics say that there’s a huge risk of diabetes and heart disease at very high BMI,” notes Lazar. “We can’t assume we’ll be one of the lucky ones who will have a BMI in the obese category but will still be protected from heart disease.”

Correction (November 2): The original version of this article misattributed the pull quote above. The attribution for this quote has been corrected, and The Scientist regrets the error.

THE HEALTH RISK OF OBESITY—BETTER METRICS IMPERATIVE

Full Text of Results…

One year after initial weight reduction, levels of the circulating mediators of appetite that encourage weight regain after diet-induced weight loss do not revert to the levels recorded before weight loss. Long-term strategies to counteract this change may be needed to prevent obesity relapse. (Funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number,NCT00870259.)

Full Text of Discussion..

FTO variant and obesity (September 2015)

Large genome wide association studies have demonstrated that variants in the FTO gene have the strongest association with obesity risk in the general population, but the mechanism of the association has been unclear. However, a nonocoding causal variant in FTO has now been identified that changes the function of adipocytes from energy utilization (beige fat) to energy storage (white fat) with a fivefold decrease in mitochondrial thermogenesis [17]. When the effect of the variant was blocked in genetically engineered mice, thermogenesis increased and weight gain did not occur, despite eating a high-fat diet. Blocking the gene’s effect in human adipocytes also increased energy utilization. This observation has important implications for potential new anti-obesity drugs. (See “Pathogenesis of obesity”, section on ‘FTO variants’.)

Liraglutide for the treatment of obesity (July 2015)

Along with diet, exercise, and behavior modification, drug therapy may be a helpful component of treatment for select patients who are overweight or obese. Liraglutide is a glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist, used for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, and can promote weight loss in patients with diabetes, as well as those without diabetes.

●In a randomized trial in nondiabetic patients who had a body mass index (BMI) of ≥30 kg/m² or ≥27 kg/m² with dyslipidemia and/or hypertension, liraglutide 3 mg once daily, compared with placebo, resulted in greater mean weight loss (-8.0 versus -2.6 kg with placebo) [18]. In addition, cardiometabolic risk factors, glycated hemoglobin (A1C), and quality of life improved modestly. Gastrointestinal side effects transiently affected at least 40 percent of the liraglutide group and were the most common reason for withdrawal (6.4 percent). Liraglutide is an option for select overweight or obese patients, although gastrointestinal side effects (nausea, vomiting) and the need for a daily injection may limit the use of this drug. (See “Obesity in adults: Drug therapy”, section on ‘Liraglutide’.)

●In a trial designed specifically to evaluate the effect of liraglutide on weight loss in overweight or obese patients with type 2 diabetes (mean weight 106 kg), liraglutide, compared with placebo, resulted in greater mean weight loss (-6.4 kg and -5.0 kg for liraglutide 3 mg and 1.8 mg, respectively, versus -2.2 kg for placebo) [19]. Treatment with liraglutide was associated with better glycemic control, a reduction in the use of oral hypoglycemic agents, and a reduction in systolic blood pressure. Although liraglutide is not considered as initial therapy for the majority of patients with type 2 diabetes, it is an option for select overweight or obese patients with type 2 diabetes who fail initial therapy with lifestyle intervention and metformin.  (See “Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus”, section on ‘Weight loss’.)

The Skinny on Fat Cells

Bruce Spiegelman has spent his career at the forefront of adipocyte differentiation and metabolism.

By Anna Azvolinsky | November 1, 2015

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44312/title/The-Skinny-on-Fat-Cells/

Bruce Spiegelman
Stanley J. Korsmeyer Professor of Cell Biology
and Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Director, Center for Energy Metabolism
and Chronic
Disease, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston

It’s hard to know whether you have the right stuff to be a scientist, but I had a passion for the research,” says Bruce Spiegelman, professor of cell biology at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. After receiving his PhD in biochemistry from Princeton University in 1978, Spiegelman sent an application to do postdoctoral research to just one lab. “I wasn’t thinking I should apply to five different labs. I just marched forward more or less in a straight line,” he says. Spiegelman did know that he had no financial backup and depended on research fellowships throughout the early phase of his science career. “I thought it was fantastic, and still think so, that a PhD in science is supported by the government. I certainly appreciated that, because many of my friends in the humanities had to support themselves by cobbling together fellowships and teaching every semester, whereas we didn’t face similar challenges in the sciences.”

Since his graduate student days, Spiegelman has realized his potential, pioneering the study of adipose tissue biology and metabolism. He was introduced to the field in Howard Green’s laboratory, then at MIT, where Spiegelman began his one and only postdoc in 1978. Green had recently developed a system for culturing adipose cells and asked Spiegelman if he wanted to study fat cell differentiation. “I knew nothing about adipose tissue, but I was really interested in any model of how one cell switches to another. Whether skin or fat didn’t matter too much to me, because I was not coming at this from the perspective of physiology but from the perspective of how do these switches work at a molecular level?”

Spiegelman has stuck with studying the biology and differentiation of fat cells for more than 30 years. While looking for the master transcriptional regulator of fat development—which his laboratory found in 1994—Spiegelman’s group also discovered one of the first examples of a nuclear oncogene that functions as a transcription factor, and, more recently, the team found that brown fat and white fat come from completely different origins and that brown and beige fat are distinct cell types. Spiegelman was also the first to provide evidence for the connection between inflammation, insulin resistance, and fat tissue.

Here, Spiegelman talks about his strong affinity for the East Coast, his laboratory’s search for molecules that can crank up brown fat production and activity, and the culture of his laboratory’s weekly meeting.

Spiegelman Sets Out

First publication. Spiegelman grew up in Massapequa, New York, a town on Long Island. “Birds, insects, fish, and animals were fascinating to me. As a kid, I imagined I would be a wildlife ranger,” he says. Spiegelman and his brother were the first in their family to attend college; Spiegelman entered the College of William and Mary in 1970 thinking he would major in psychology. But before taking his first psychology course, he had to take a biology course, really loved it, and switched his major. For his senior thesis, he chose one of the few labs that did biochemistry-related research. He studied cultures of the filamentous fungus Aspergillus ornatus in which he induced the upregulation of a metabolic enzyme. Spiegelman applied a calculus transformation that related the age of the culture to the age of individual cells, something that had not been previously done. The work earned him his first first-author publication in 1975. “It was not a great breakthrough, but I think it showed that I was maybe applying myself more than the typical undergraduate.”

Full steam ahead. “My interest in laboratory research was intense. Even though it was not particularly inspired work, the first-author publication in a college where not many of the professors published a lot gave me a lot of confidence. It was probably out of proportion to the quality of the actual work.” That confidence and Spiegelman’s interest in the chemistry of living things led him to pursue a PhD in biochemistry at Princeton University. “Very early on, I felt that I couldn’t understand biology if it didn’t go to the molecular level. To me, just describing how an animal lived without understanding how it worked was very unsatisfying. I think it was one of the best decisions that I made in my life, to do a PhD in biochemistry,” he says, “because if you really want to understand living systems, you are very limited in how you can understand them without having a strong background in biochemistry because these are, essentially, chemical systems.”

Embracing molecular biology. Spiegelman initially joined Arthur Pardee’s laboratory, but switched when Pardee left Princeton for Harvard University in 1975. Because he was already collaborating with Marc Kirschner, a cell biologist and biochemist who studies the regulation of the cell cycle and how the cytoskeleton works, it was an easy transition to transfer to the new laboratory. In Kirschner’s group, Spiegelman became the cell biologist among many protein biochemists working on microtubule assembly in vitro. Rather than understanding how the proteins fit together to form the filamentous structures, Spiegelman wanted to understand what controlled their assembly inside cells. Working in mammalian cells, Spiegelman published three consecutive Cell papers on how microtubule assembly occurs in vivo. The firstpaper, from 1977, demonstrated that a nucleotide functions to stabilize the tubulin molecule rather than to regulate tubulin assembly in vivo.

Spiegelman Simmers

A new tool. For his next move, Spiegelman wanted to marry his background in biochemistry and molecular biology with a good cellular model system. He became interested in differentiation at the end of his PhD, while studying how the cytoskeleton is reorganized during neural differentiation, and settled on Green’s MIT laboratory for his postdoc. Green had developed a way to study both skin and fat cell differentiation. Again, Spiegelman was the odd man out, working on the molecular biology of fat cell differentiation while most of the graduate students and postdocs focused on the cellular biology of skin cell differentiation. While there, Spiegelman learned how to clone cDNA—a new method that some researchers thought was just another new fad, he says. “I thought it was pretty obvious that this was a tool that would be a game changer. I could see how I could clone some of the cDNAs and genes that were regulated in the fat cell lineage and then try to understand the regulation of these genes.”

Setting the stage. Spiegelman demonstrated that cAMP regulates the synthesis of certain enzymes in fat cells during differentiation. But while this was the most influential paper from his postdoc, says Spiegelman, it was his demonstration of cloning mRNAs from adipocytes, published in 1983, that set the stage for cloning fat-selective genes. The work, mostly done when Spiegelman was already a new faculty member at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, stemmed from his learning molecular cloning in Phillip Sharp’s lab at MIT and Bryan Roberts’s lab at Harvard. “This was the raw material from which we eventually cloned PPARγ and showed it to be the master regulator of fat [cell] development.”

Roots. Spiegelman became an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School in 1982, when he was not yet 30. Although he had entertained the idea of moving to the West Coast with his wife, whom he had met at Princeton where she obtained a PhD in French literature, Spiegelman says he is really an East Coaster at heart. “My wife and I came to love Boston and were very comfortable there. Our families were both in New York, which was close, but not too close, and we really enjoyed the culture and pace of Boston; it was more ‘us.’ We really liked to visit California but didn’t particularly want to move there. We’re both real Northeastern people.”

Relating to Sisyphus. The transition from doing a postdoc to setting up his own laboratory was “very exciting and terribly stressful,” says Spiegelman. “When I think back, I always tried to be professional with my laboratory, but I was so stressed at suddenly being on my own with no management training.” The people resources he had encountered in his graduate and postdoctoral training labs were also not there yet, and he says his first publication as a principal investigator was like pushing a rock up a hill. But eventually, Spiegelman’s lab built a reputation and reached a critical mass of talented people who advanced the science. Again in 1983, Spiegelman produced a publication showing that morphological manipulation can affect gene expression and adipose differentiation.

End goal. Spiegelman’s goal was to find a master molecule that  orchestrates the conversion of adipocyte precursor cells into bona fide fat cells. Piece by piece, his lab identified the enhancers, promoters, and other regulatory elements involved in adipocyte differentiation. In 1994, graduate student Peter Tontonoz finallyfound that the PPARγ gene, inserted via a retroviral vector into fibroblasts, could induce the cells to become adipose cells. “It took 10 years,” Spiegelman says. Along the way, the laboratory found that c-fos, the product of a famous nuclear oncogene, bound to the promoters of fat-specific genes and worked as a transcription factor. “It was not really known how nuclear oncogenes worked. This was one of the first papers showing that these oncogenes bound to gene promoters and were transcription factors.”

A wider scope. In 1993, graduate student Gökhan Hotamisligil found that tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-α), is induced in the fat tissue of rodent models of obesity and diabetes. The paper sparked the formation of the field of immunometabolism and resulted in the expansion of Spiegelman’s lab into the physiology arena, partly thanks to the guidance of C. Ronald Kahn and Jeff Flier, who both study metabolism and diabetes. But the work initially encountered pushback, says Spiegelman, partly because it was the merging of two fields.

Spiegelman Scales Up

Fat color palette. Brown fat tissue, abundant in infants but scarce in adults, is a metabolically active form of fat that is chock full of mitochondria and is found in pockets in the body distinct from white fat tissue.Pere Puigserver, then a postdoc in Spiegelman’s lab, found that the coactivator PCG-1, binding to PPARγ and other nuclear receptors, could stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis. The PCG-1 gene is turned on by stimuli such as exercise or a cold environment. Later, postdoc Patrick Seale, Spiegelman, and their colleagues showed brown fat cells derive from the same lineage that gives rise to skeletal muscle. “This was a big surprise, maybe the biggest surprise we ever uncovered in the lab,” says Spiegelman.

A paler shade of brown. More recently, in 2012, Spiegelman’s laboratory showed that within adult white adipose tissue, there are pockets of a yet another type of fat tissue that he called beige fat. “I think the evidence is very good from rodents that if you activate brown and beige fat, you get metabolic benefit both in obesity and diabetes. So the question now is: Can that be done in humans in a way that’s beneficial and not toxic?”  The lab is now looking to identify molecules that can either ramp up the activity of brown and beige fat or increase the production of both cell types as possible therapeutics for metabolic disorders or even cancer-associated cachexia. “Anyone who says that either approach will work better is being foolish. We just don’t know enough to go after just one or the other.”

On the irisin controversy. After reporting in 2012 that a muscle-related hormone called irisin could switch white fat to metabolically active brown fat, Spiegelman became embroiled in a media-covered debate about whether the molecule really exists; he was also the victim of a potential fraud plot. Most recently, Spiegelman provided thorough evidence that irisin does in fact exist. On the controversy, he says it’s a fine line between defending his scientific integrity and not adding more fuel to the fire or engaging with his harassers. “We have a long track record of doing credible and reproducible science and it was not that complicated to address the paper that claimed irisin was ‘a myth.’ That study used very outmoded scientific approaches.”

Raw talent. Many of Spiegelman’s trainees have gone on to become very successful scientists, including Tontonoz, Hotamisligil, Evan Rosen, and Randy Johnson. “It’s a quantum change in the experience of doing science when you get people who have their own visions. I would have thought that interacting with smart people would mainly help me get my scientific vision accomplished. And that was partly true, but also it changed my vision. When you have people challenging you on a day-to-day basis, you learn from them through the questions they ask and the way they challenge you in a constructive way. They made me a much better scientist.”

Rigorous mentorship.  “I feel very passionately that a major part of my job is to prepare the next generation of scientists. Everyone who comes through my lab will tell you that I take that very seriously. We make sure my students give a lot of talks and get critical assessments of their presentations to our lab group. I am very hands-on both scientifically and in developing the way students project their vision. I had a very good mentor, Marc Kirschner, and I’d like to think that I learned how to be a mentor from him. I want to make sure that when people walk out of my lab they are prepared to run independent research programs.”

Greatest Hits

• Identified the master regulator of adipogenesis, the nuclear receptor PPARγ
• Was the first to show that a nuclear oncogene, c-fos, codes for a transcription factor that binds to the promoters of genes
• Demonstrated that adipose tissue synthesizes tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), providing the first direct link between obesity, inflammation, insulin resistance, and fat tissue.
• Showed that brown fat cells are not developmentally related to white fat
• Identified beige fat as a distinct cell type, different from either white or brown fat

Fanning the Flames

Obesity triggers a fatty acid synthesis pathway, which in turn helps drive T cell differentiation and inflammation.

By Kate Yandell | November 1, 2015

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/44306/title/Fanning-the-Flames/

EDITOR’S CHOICE IN IMMUNOLOGY

The paper
Y. Endo et al., “Obesity drives Th17 cell differentiation by inducing the lipid metabolic kinase, ACC1,” Cell Reports, 12:1042-55, 2015.

http://www.the-scientist.com/November2015/NovMediLit_310px.jpg

FEEDING INFLAMMATION: When mice eat a diet high in fat, their CD4 T cells show increased expression of the fatty acid biosynthesis gene Acaca, which encodes the enzyme ACC1 (1). Products of the ACC1 fatty acid synthesis pathway encourage the transcription factor RORγt to bind near the gene encoding the cytokine IL-17A (2). There, RORγt recruits an enzyme called p300 to modify the genome epigenetically and turn on IL-17A. The memory T cells then differentiate into inflammatory T helper 17 cells.
See full infographic: PDF© STEVE GRAEPEL

Obesity often comes with a side of chronic inflammation, causing inflammatory chemicals and immune cells to flood adipose tissue, the hypothalamus, the liver, and other areas of the body. Inflammation is a big part of what makes obesity such an unhealthy condition, contributing to Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancers, autoimmune disorders, and possibly even neurodegenerative diseases.

The prevalence of obesity has been increasing worldwide, and obesity is now a major public health problem in most developed countries (Gregor and Hotamisligil, 2011, Ng et al., 2014). Obesity-induced inflammation contributes to the development of various chronic diseases, such as autoimmune diseases, metabolic diseases, and cancer (Kanneganti and Dixit, 2012, Kim et al., 2014,Osborn and Olefsky, 2012, Winer et al., 2009a). A number of studies have pointed out the importance of reciprocal interactions between metabolic systems and immune cells in the pathogenesis of obesity-associated diseases (Kaminski and Randall, 2010, Kanneganti and Dixit, 2012, Kim et al., 2014, Mauer et al., 2014, Stienstra et al., 2012, Winer et al., 2011).

Elucidating the molecular mechanisms by which naive CD4 T cells differentiate into effector T cells is crucial for understanding helper T (Th) cell-mediated immune pathogenicity. After antigen stimulation, naive CD4 T cells differentiate into at least four distinct Th cell subsets: Th1, Th2, Th17, and inducible regulatory T (iTreg) cells (O’Shea and Paul, 2010, Reiner, 2007). Several specific master transcription factors that regulate Th1/Th2/Th17/iTreg cell differentiation have been identified, including T-bet for Th1 (Szabo et al., 2000), GATA3 (Yamashita et al., 2004, Zheng and Flavell, 1997) for Th2, retinoic-acid-receptor-related orphan receptor γt (RORγt) for Th17 (Ivanov et al., 2006), and forkhead box protein 3 (Foxp3) for iTreg (Sakaguchi et al., 2008). The appropriate expression and function of these transcription factors is essential for proper immune regulation by each Th cell subset.

Among these Th cell subsets, Th17 cells contribute to the host defense against fungi and extracellular bacteria (Milner et al., 2008). However, the pathogenicity of IL-17-producing T cells has been recognized in various autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, inflammatory bowel diseases, and steroid-resistant asthma (Bettelli et al., 2006, Coccia et al., 2012, Ivanov et al., 2006,Leonardi et al., 2012, McGeachy and Cua, 2008, Nylander and Hafler, 2012,Stockinger et al., 2007, Sundrud et al., 2009).

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