The Development of a Standard In Vitro Model for Studying Metabolic Diseases

Human adipose tissue is composed of brown and white adipocytes, which play critical roles in nutritional homeostasis, thermoregulation, and endocrine function. White adipocytes are at the center of the growing obesity pandemic, while brown adipocyte dysfunction may contribute to impaired cold tolerance and a decline in cardiometabolic health. To understand brown (BAT) and white (WAT) adipose tissue physiology requires mechanistic experiments at the cellular level; however, limited access to patient-derived adipose tissue or validated adipocyte cell lines hampers these efforts. In this webinar, Dr. Aaron Cypess, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will present on the hTERT-immortalized brown (hTERT-hBA; ATCC CRL-4062) and white (hTERT-hWA; ATCC CRL-4063) pre-adipocytes cell lines that his laboratory in collaboration with ATCC have developed and characterized. Dr. Cypess will demonstrate that hTERT-hWA and hTERT-hBA maintain the adrenergic signaling, lipolysis, and thermogenesis typical of primary adipocytes and that these two cell lines are metabolically distinct. Transcriptomics via RNA-seq were consistent with these functional studies and establish a molecular signature for each cell type. This well-characterized pair of immortalized BAT and WAT cells are anticipated to become important models for future physiological, pharmacological, and genetic studies of human adipocyte biology.