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posted by janrinok on Wednesday December 21 2016, @12:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the hey-dough-boy! dept.

Obesity's effects extend all through the body, and the liver is one of the more serious victims. Poor diet can cause fat to build up in the organ, leading to chronic liver disease and other serious health issues like diabetes and heart disease. Now a team from Saint Louis University has found that switching off a particular protein decreased the body fat and improved the blood sugar levels of mice.
...
"When I think of fatty liver disease, I think of fatty hepatocytes – liver cells," explains Baldan. "Each cell has many lipid droplets, and those droplets contain triglycerides. The lipid droplets aren't skinny-dipping in the cells, though. They are coated by proteins. One such protein is called 'fat-specific protein 27,' or FSP27."

The function of body fat is to store energy for later use. But what FSP27 does is prevent those lipids from mobilizing – being used – and instead encourages them to stay put in the cell. A high-fat diet increases the amount of FSP27 and, in turn, the amount of fat that builds up in the liver. Inversely, triglycerides can also accumulate as a result of fasting, which sees the body begin to process more stored fat, sending mobilized fat to the liver for processing.

Knowing this, the team hypothesized that shutting off FSP27 should reduce fat build-up. To test the idea, the researchers used two groups of obese mice, afflicted with high blood sugar and fatty liver disease. The difference was, one group was fed a high-fat diet, while the other mice were genetically modified. Some of each group were then treated with antisense oligonucleotides, polymers which essentially switch off FSP27.

Mice treated with a compound to shut off the fat-specific protein FSP27 showed significant declines in fat.


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