Proliferation of nutrition sensing preadipocytes upon short term HFD feeding

ABSTRACT

Adipose tissue is highly dynamic and increases its size dependent on the status of nutrition. Generally, an increase of adipose tissue mass is attributed to two mechanisms, namely hypertrophy (increase in adipocyte size) and hyperplasia (increase in adipocyte number). Here, we analyzed the proliferation capacity of a pool of nutrition sensing preadipocytes after short-term high fat diet (HFD) feeding. We show that this process is age independent and that adipocyte hyperplasia seems not to be dependent on adipocyte hypertrophy. Further, we could show that the subsequent development into adipocytes is influenced by the duration of HFD feeding after proliferation. Our data also demonstrate that the studied pool of preadipocytes seems to be finite and cannot be reactivated by multiple bouts of HFD feeding. In conclusion, our results indicate an important link between stem cells, nutrition status and homeostasis in the epididymal adipose tissue.

KEYWORDS:

• Epididymal adipose tissue
• hyperplasia
• hypertrophy
• preadipocytes
• nutrition sensing
• proliferation and age
• high fat diet (HFD)

Acknowledgments

We thank E. Kiehlmann for her help with the microscopy sections. Also we thank D. H. Dapito for her constructive discussions and carefully reading the manuscript. We thank G. Grandl for the Macro to calculate adipocyte area.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [31003A 162887].

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Kulenkampff

Elisabeth Kulenkampff and Christian Wolfrum designed the study and wrote the manuscript. EK preformed all experiments.