There could be new hope for people aiming to fight obesity, following a research breakthrough identifying certain microproteins that store fat.
In findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in the United States, the team from the California-based Salk Institute for Biological Studies said that the microproteins “could potentially serve as drug targets to treat obesity and other metabolic disorders”.
The findings could prove particularly useful for people who struggle with other treatments, such as lifestyle changes, bariatric surgery or courses of drugs such as semaglutide.
”The obesity rate has more than doubled in the last 30 years, affecting more than one billion people worldwide,” the Salk Institute warned, reminding that being overweight is linked to “other metabolic disorders” such as diabetes, cardiovascular (heart) diseases, chronic kidney disease and cancers.
Microproteins, according to the team, are “an understudied class of molecules found throughout the body that play roles in both health and disease”.
The team believes the findings are noteworthy because they entailed the use of CRISPR gene editing to screen thousands of fat cell genes to try to find genes “that likely code for microproteins that regulate either fat cell proliferation or lipid accumulation”.
CRISPR screens work by cutting out genes of interest in cells and observing whether the cell thrives or dies without them.
From these results, scientists can determine the importance and function of specific genes.
”We wanted to know if there was anything we had been missing in all these years of research into the body’s metabolic processes,” says study first author and postdoctoral researcher Dr Victor Pai.
“And CRISPR allows us to pick out interesting and functional genes that specifically impact lipid accumulation and fat cell development.”
He adds that: “We’re not the first to screen for microproteins with CRISPR, but we’re the first to look for microproteins involved in fat cell proliferation.
"This is a huge step for metabolism and obesity research.”– dpa
