Jo Junghyo, Shreif Zeina, Periwal Vipul
Laboratory of Biological Modeling; National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; National Institutes of Health; Bethesda, MD USA.
Adipocyte. 2012 Apr 1;1(2):80-88. doi: 10.4161/adip.19705.
Adipose cells are unique in the dynamism of their sizes, a requisite for their main function of storing and releasing lipid. Lipid metabolism is crucial for energy homeostasis. However, the regulation of lipid storage capacity in conditions of energy excess and scarcity is still not clear. It is not technically feasible to monitor every process affecting storage capacity such as recruitment, growth/shrinkage and death of individual adipose cells in real time for a sufficiently long period. However, recent computational approaches have allowed an examination of the detailed dynamics of adipose cells using statistical information in the form of precise measurements of adipose cell-size probability distributions. One interesting finding is that the growth/shrinkage of adipose cells (> 50 μm diameter) under positive/negative energy balance is proportional to the surface area of cells, limiting efficient lipid absorption/release from larger adipose cells. In addition to the physical characteristics of adipose cells, quantitative modeling integrates dynamics of adipose cells, providing the mechanism of cell turnover under normal and drug-treated conditions. Thus, further use of mathematical modeling applied to experimental measurements of adipose cell-size probability distributions in conjunction with physiological measurements of metabolic state may help unravel the intricate network of interactions underlying metabolic syndromes in obesity.
脂肪细胞的独特之处在于其大小的动态变化，这是其储存和释放脂质主要功能的必要条件。脂质代谢对能量平衡至关重要。然而，在能量过剩和不足的情况下，脂质储存能力的调节仍不清楚。要在足够长的时间内实时监测影响储存能力的每个过程，如单个脂肪细胞的募集、生长/收缩和死亡，在技术上是不可行的。然而，最近的计算方法允许利用以脂肪细胞大小概率分布的精确测量形式存在的统计信息来研究脂肪细胞的详细动态。一个有趣的发现是，在正/负能量平衡下，脂肪细胞（直径>50μm）的生长/收缩与细胞表面积成正比，这限制了较大脂肪细胞有效地吸收/释放脂质。除了脂肪细胞的物理特性外，定量建模整合了脂肪细胞的动态变化，提供了正常和药物处理条件下细胞更新的机制。因此，进一步将数学建模应用于脂肪细胞大小概率分布的实验测量，并结合代谢状态的生理测量，可能有助于揭示肥胖中代谢综合征背后复杂的相互作用网络。
