Sun, Lei

Obesity is a major source of morbidity and mortality and is increasingly prevalent in many areas of the world. Excess fat accumulation is a contributing factor in such severe human diseases as type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. It is urgent to develop new therapies to treat obesity. The recent discovery of brown fat in human makes this energy-burning organ an attractive therapeutic target.

There are two principal types of fat in mammals. While white adipose tissue is specialized for energy storage, brown adipose tissue burns lipids for heat generation and energy expenditure as a defense of cold temperature and obesity. Our long term goal is to determine the regulatory mechanisms governing brown fat development as a prerequisite to the development of therapeutic strategies that can be used to combat obesity.

Multiple protein factors have been demonstrated to play important roles in brown fat development. However, whether and how non-coding genes may contribute to this biological process is largely unknown.  Now, it has been well accepted that a vast majority of the genome is actively transcribed to generate large mounts of RNAs. Thousands of these transcripts don’t encode proteins and are referred as non-coding RNAs.  For decades, these non-coding RNAs were merely considered as transcriptional noises. However, accumulating evidence is supporting a notion that non-coding RNAs are critical regulators in many physiological and pathological processes. Currently, we are determining the role of non-coding RNAs such as microRNAs and lncRNAs (long non-coding RNAs) in brown fat development and obesity. Through these studies, we attempt to identify new drug targets for obesity treatment.