Discovery

During the past 20 years or so, obesity has become a world wide problem. It affects those people who fail to look after their health, especially their habit in eating, since obesity is intimately linked to food and fat.

Again and again, there the word goes : fat. Why fat makes people have obesity?

By observing the growth of fat after injections of different kinds of immature cells, scientists at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rockefeller University have discovered an important fat precursor cell that may in time explain how changes in the numbers of fat cells might increase and lead to obesity, using mouse as the object in the research.

Obesity known to be responsible in cardiovascular disease and diabetes, results, from an increase in the mass and number of white fat cells. Scientists have hypothesized that a population of fat precursor cells must exist in the fat depot in order to produce new fat cells.

Matt Rodeheffer used a cell sorting technique called fluorescence-activated cell sorting and found that only one of the isolated cell populations, which express the CD24 cell-surface marker protein, produced fat tissue in the fatless mouse.

From the study, the scientist hope that they can explain how the growth and differentiation of these cells are regulated in obesity and determine whether or not the molecular events that are involved in the regulation of adipose tissue are contributing factors to other pathologies, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease, that are associated with obesity and metabolic syndrome.

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