Scientists from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have developed a new method to identify brown fat, which can help tackle the problem of obesity.
Dieticians often emphasize on the fact that not all fat is bad. In fact, the body requires certain amount of fat to function properly. Therefore, it is essential to consume brown fat, which is referred to as good fat instead of white fat. Brown fat is used to burn energy that helps in keeping the body warm and metabolically active while white fat just accumulates in the body, creating health problems.
So how do you identify brown fat? Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have developed a new method that can help in this identification. The lack of resources to identify brown cells at the molecular level hinders the cells' ability to fight obesity.
"Brown adipose tissue, responsible for heat generation, has high importance in the context of metabolic diseases," said Mikhail Kolonin, Ph.D., the study's senior author. "Brown fat is more common in children but has recently been discovered in adult humans. However, measurement of its body distribution has remained technically challenging. We report a peptide probe that zeroes in on brown fat and can be used for localization of this tissue in mice by whole body imaging."
Researchers are hopeful that if this new identification method proves to be effective, it could help physicians customize treatments for their patients based on the ratio of brown fat to white fat in their bodies. For the study, Kolonin and his team first developed a near-infrared fluorescence imaging probe, which was a peptide made from a series of amino acids. This probe attaches itself to brown adipose vasculature and emits tiny amounts of skin-penetrating light that can be picked up by highly sensitive cameras
"This is the first targeted imaging approach for the detection of brown fat," Kolonin said.
