Researchers hope someday to be able to tell fat cells to burn off excess calories as heat, instead of storing them and causing people to become overweight or obese. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly.
Understanding of fat cells could lead to calorie-burning treatments
Researchers are a step closer to figuring out how to instruct fat cells to burn off excess calories as heat, instead of storing them and causing people to become overweight or obese, according to a report published on Thursday in Science Advances.
Humans have two kinds of fat: white fat, which stores energy, and brown fat, which breaks down blood sugar and fat molecules to create heat and help maintain body temperature.
The protein in brown fat that allows it to burn off calories is called ‘uncoupling protein 1’ (UCP1), and researchers say they have now identified its molecular structure.
“Even with more brown fat, UCP1 must still be ‘switched on’ to gain full benefit. And research has been hampered by a lack of details on the molecular make up of UCP1,” explained study coauthor Dr. Paul Crichton, from the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School, in a statement. “Despite more than 40 years of research, we did not know what UCP1 looks like to understand how it works – until now.”
The new molecular details will aid development of drugs that can that activate UCP1 artificially to burn off excess calories, and that could one day help combat obesity and related diseases, such as diabetes, the researchers said.
“There has been a lot of interest in how to increase brown fat and activate UCP1 therapeutically, as a potential way to treat obesity,” Crichton said.
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