Zeng's group reported recent findings on the neural regulation

of white adipose tissue metabolism on Cell Metabolism

    On September 14^th, Cell Metabolism published research work entitled “Dense Intra-Adipose Sympathetic Arborizations Are Essential for Cold-Induced Beiging of Mouse White Adipose Tissue” by Dr. Wenwen Zeng’s group from Institute for Immunology, Tsinghua University. This work reveals that sympathetic arborizations play important role in white adipose tissue metabolism.

    Efferent signals from the central nervous system represent a key layer of regulation of white adipose tissue (WAT). In this study, Zeng group reported the visualization of the neural arborizations in mouse inguinal WAT at single-fiber resolution. The volume images reveal a dense network of sympathetic arborizations, with sympathetic fibers being in close apposition to the majority of adipocytes. Also, those sympathetic fibers are shown to originate from the celiac ganglia, which are activated by cold challenge. Abolishment of intra-adipose arborizations results in defects in cold-induced beiging of inguinal WAT. Furthermore, local sympathetic arborizations function through adrenergic receptors in this beiging process. These findings uncover an essential link connecting efferent neural signals with metabolism of individual adipocytes.

    The graduate students Haochen Jiang and Xiaofan Ding are co-first authors and Dr. Wenwen Zeng is the corresponding author of this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Beijing Natural Science Foundation, the Thousand-Talent Young Investigator Program, the National Key R&D Program of China, the Center for Life Sciences, and Institute for Immunology and School of Medicine at Tsinghua University.

    The original paper could be found from the following link: http://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(17)30501-6