Feedback Loops of Adipogenesis Targeted (FAT)

The obesity pandemic has become one of the most important global health issues, causing an annual health burden of 2 trillion Euros. To uncover the origin of increased or decreased fat cell production and to find novel treatment strategies, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying regulatory mechanism is indispensable. So far, studying signaling pathways in adipogenesis has largely focused on a single molecular layer (e.g. mRNA or protein) without considering higher levels of network connectivity such as feedback and crosstalk between different molecular layers (e.g. lipids, metabolites and proteins). However, it is becoming more and more evident that complex signaling networks can only be fully understood within the context of metabolic control. The aim of this proposal is to decipher the metabolic network of fat cell differentiation to understand how small molecules can control the number of fat cells during differentiation.