Carlos Ibanez Lab @ PKU & CIBR
McGovern Institute at Peking University & Chinese Institute for Brain Research
Sustained anti-obesity effects of life-style change and anti-inflammatory interventions after conditional inactivation of the activin receptor ALK7
Rajkamal Srivastava, Ee-Soo Lee, Eunice Sim, New Chih Shen and Carlos F. Ibáñez (2021)
The FASEB Journal 2021;35:e21759
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Life- style change and anti-inflammatory interventions have only transient effects in obesity. It is not clear how benefits obtained by these treatments can be maintained longer term, especially during sustained high caloric intake. Constitutive ablation of the activin receptor ALK7 in adipose tissue enhances catecholamine signaling and lipolysis in adipocytes, and protects mice from diet-induced obesity.
In this study, we investigated the consequences of conditional ALK7 ablation in adipocytes of adult mice with pre- existing obesity. Although ALK7 deletion had little effect on its own, it synergized strongly with a transient switch to low- fat diet (life-style change) or anti-inflammatory treatment (Na-salicylate), resulting in enhanced lipolysis, increased energy expenditure, and reduced adipose tissue mass and body weight gain, even under sustained high caloric intake. By themselves, diet- switch and salicylate had only a temporary effect on weight gain. Mechanistically, combination of ALK7 ablation with either treatment strongly enhanced the levels of β3-AR, the main adrenergic receptor for catecholamine stimulation of lipolysis, and C/EBPα, an upstream regulator of β3-AR expression. These results suggest that inhibition of ALK7 can be combined with simple interventions to produce longer- lasting benefits in obesity.
The paper has been published in The FASEB Journal.
Read the full paper HERE
Regulation of metabolic homeostasis by the TGF-b superfamily receptor ALK7
Ibanez, C.F (2021
FEBS Journal, June 2021, doi:10.1111/febs.16090
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PhD student
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Mouse Colony Manager
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Mouse Colony Manager
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Yanchen Ma obtained a PhD in Cell Biology in December 2020, from the School of Life Science, Xiamen University, China, under the supervision of Prof. Ying Chen. The title of her PhD thesis is “A GPR17-cAMP-lactate signaling axis in oligodendrocytes regulates whole-body metabolism”. She is joining the neuroscience team to unravel novel mechanisms of p75ntr subcellular localization and signaling.
Pawanrat Tangseefa, a.k.a. Queenie, obtained a PhD in Medicine/Physiology in May 2020 from the University of Adelaide, Australia, under supervision of Prof. Andrew Zannettino. The title of her PhD thesis is “The role of osteoblasts-mTORC1 in the regulation of glucose metabolism”. She is joining the metabolism team to elucidate the mechanistic basis of the metabolic effects of mutations in the ACVR1C gene found in the human population.
Postdoc
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Meng Xie took a PhD in 2014 at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. His doctoral thesis was on studies of the regulation of lipid metabolism in the dauer larvae of Caenorhabditis elegans. With a prestigious EMBO fellowship, he then undertook postdoctoral studies at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, under the guidance of A/Prof. Andrei Chagin. During his postdoc tenure, he worked on several projects, including studies on the mediation of phenotypic plasticity of body size and craniofacial shape by amino acid sensing, and evolution of long bone secondary ossification center and regulation of craniofacial cartilage during development. He has an impressive research output, with articles in Cell Metabolism, PNAS, Nature and eLife. Meng will conduct research at the new units at PKU and CIBR, and assist in training of students and lab management tasks.
