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Anatomical localization, gene expression profiling and functional characterization of adult human neck brown fat

2013; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 19; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/nm.3112

1546-170X

Aaron M. Cypess, Andrew P. White, Cécile Vernochet, Tim J. Schulz, Ruidan Xue, Christina A. Sass, Tian Liang Huang, Carla Roberts‐Toler, Lauren S Weiner, Cathy Sze, Aron T. Chacko, Laura N. Deschamps, Lindsay M. Herder, Nathan A. Truchan, Allison L Glasgow, Ashley R. Holman, Alina Gavrila, Per-Olof J. Hasselgren, Marcelo A. Mori, Michael Molla, Yu‐Hua Tseng,

Cardiovascular Disease and Adiposity

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) burns, rather than stores, energy and has thus been explored as a way to combat obesity. Aaron Cypess and his colleagues isolate neck fat from adult humans and show that BAT exists in this region, define its anatomical localization in the neck relative to white adipose tissue and demonstrate that it is functional. The imbalance between energy intake and expenditure is the underlying cause of the current obesity and diabetes pandemics. Central to these pathologies is the fat depot: white adipose tissue (WAT) stores excess calories, and brown adipose tissue (BAT) consumes fuel for thermogenesis using tissue-specific uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1)1,2. BAT was once thought to have a functional role in rodents and human infants only, but it has been recently shown that in response to mild cold exposure, adult human BAT consumes more glucose per gram than any other tissue3. In addition to this nonshivering thermogenesis, human BAT may also combat weight gain by becoming more active in the setting of increased whole-body energy intake4,5,6,7. This phenomenon of BAT-mediated diet-induced thermogenesis has been observed in rodents8 and suggests that activation of human BAT could be used as a safe treatment for obesity and metabolic dysregulation9. In this study, we isolated anatomically defined neck fat from adult human volunteers and compared its gene expression, differentiation capacity and basal oxygen consumption to different mouse adipose depots. Although the properties of human neck fat vary substantially between individuals, some human samples share many similarities with classical, also called constitutive, rodent BAT.