Endocrine Abstracts

The activation of brown adipose tissue (BAT), the primary organ for adaptive heat production, confers beneficial effects on adiposity, insulin resistance, and hyperlipidaemia. Recent findings indicate that BAT in human adults might consist not only of classical brown adipocytes but also inducible brown adipocytes (also called beige or brite adipocytes), which are phenotypically distinct from both white and brown adipocytes. However, it remains unclear whether these beige adipocytes arising also in white adipose tissue (WAT) of mice are as powerful as their brown adipocyte relatives are.

Here we show that the conversion of white to beige adipocytes creates a cell type metabolically as powerful as classical brown adipocytes. We visualize energy catabolism in brown adipocytes in BAT as well as in beige adipocytes in inguinal WAT by non-invasive MRI and intravital imaging. Notably, only beige but not white adipocytes in WAT exhibit increased uptake of energy-rich metabolites at their access site to the capillary. The remodeling of WAT is associated with a shift in the lipidomic landscape from dietary to endogenously produced fatty acids in WAT and in plasma.

In conclusion, we provide experimental evidence that the formation and activation of beige adipocytes in WAT initiates a metabolic reprogramming of glucose and lipid metabolism, ameliorating whole body metabolic health thereby also lowering plaque burden in a humanized atherosclerosis mouse model.