Jung Su Myung, Sanchez-Gurmaches Joan, Guertin David A
Program in Molecular Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA.
Division of Endocrinology, Division of Developmental Biology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Research Foundation, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Handb Exp Pharmacol. 2019;251:3-36. doi: 10.1007/164_2018_168.
Brown adipose tissue is well known to be a thermoregulatory organ particularly important in small rodents and human infants, but it was only recently that its existence and significance to metabolic fitness in adult humans have been widely realized. The ability of active brown fat to expend high amounts of energy has raised interest in stimulating thermogenesis therapeutically to treat metabolic diseases related to obesity and type 2 diabetes. In parallel, there has been a surge of research aimed at understanding the biology of rodent and human brown fat development, its remarkable metabolic properties, and the phenomenon of white fat browning, in which white adipocytes can be converted into brown like adipocytes with similar thermogenic properties. Here, we review the current understanding of the developmental and metabolic pathways involved in forming thermogenic adipocytes, and highlight some of the many unknown functions of brown fat that make its study a rich and exciting area for future research.
棕色脂肪组织作为一种体温调节器官广为人知，在小型啮齿动物和人类婴儿中尤为重要，但直到最近，其在成年人类中的存在及其对代谢健康的重要性才得到广泛认识。活跃的棕色脂肪消耗大量能量的能力引发了人们对通过治疗性刺激产热来治疗与肥胖和2型糖尿病相关的代谢疾病的兴趣。与此同时，大量研究旨在了解啮齿动物和人类棕色脂肪发育的生物学特性、其显著的代谢特性以及白色脂肪褐变现象，即白色脂肪细胞可转化为具有类似产热特性的棕色脂肪样细胞。在此，我们综述了目前对形成产热脂肪细胞所涉及的发育和代谢途径的理解，并强调了棕色脂肪许多未知功能中的一些，这些功能使其成为未来研究丰富且令人兴奋的领域。
