Fruit-fly fatty secrets shed light on liver disease
Wednesday 29th November
Fruit flies are proving surprising allies in the fight against major human diseases like diabetes and fatty liver, thanks to new research by scientists at the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR). Researchers there have discovered the cells responsible for fat metabolism in the fruit fly, Drosophila, and now hope to exploit Drosophila genetics to speed up the discovery of new drugs for treating human liver diseases. Their findings are published today in Nature.
In humans, dietary fat is stored in fatty tissue but can be retrieved and converted into energy during long periods between meals. Many of the important steps in metabolizing fat molecules and converting them into energy take place within the liver. The importance of maintaining a balance between fat build up and break down in the liver is highlighted by the fatty liver disease that is associated with obesity-related conditions such as type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
A healthy fly liver contains very little fat (left) but the liver of flies with defective metabolism are very fatty (right). In these pictures, fat droplets are stained with a red dye
While fruit flies share many genes with us and have proved useful for understanding several human diseases, how they metabolize fat has so far been a mystery. This has limited their use in studying the mechanisms of human liver disease and obesity related conditions. However, a group of scientists, led by NIMR’s Dr. Alex Gould, has now identified the fly cells – called oenocytes – that perform similar fat-metabolizing functions to our livers.
Dr Gould says: “These findings reveal that flies have an equivalent to our liver and that they store, process and burn fat in a way that is strikingly similar to us. We hope that a Drosophila model of fatty liver disease will help to accelerate the rate at which chemical compounds can be tested for use as new drugs for human liver diseases.”
Dr. Gould added: “As well as identifying the Drosophila ‘liver’, we found that flies share more than 20 ‘fat burning’ genes with humans. These discoveries may help us understand more about how our own bodies store and burn fat.”
Key Facts
- The fruit fly Drosophila shares 75% of our DNA, according to the latest research from the National Institutes of Health.
- According to Diabetes UK, there are currently over 2 million people with diabetes in the UK and there are up to another 750,000 people with diabetes who have the condition but don’t yet know it.
- The metabolic syndrome is characterized by a group of metabolic risk factors present in one patient. People with the metabolic syndrome are at increased risk of coronary heart disease and other diseases related to plaque buildups in artery walls (e.g., stroke and peripheral vascular disease) and type 2 diabetes.
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Notes to editors
MRC/47/06
