Characterization of a primary brown adipocyte culture system derived from human fetal interscapular fat.

Brown fat has gained widespread attention as a potential therapeutic target to treat obesity and associated metabolic disorders. Indeed, the anti-obesity potential of multiple targets to stimulate both brown adipocyte differentiation and recruitment have been verified in rodent models. However, their therapeutic potential in humans is unknown due to the lack of a human primary brown adipocyte cell culture system. Likewise, the lack of a well-characterized human model has limited the discovery of novel targets for the activation of human brown fat. To address this current need, we aimed to identify and describe the first primary brown adipocyte cell culture system from human fetal interscapular brown adipose tissue. Pre-adipocytes isolated from non-viable human fetal interscapular tissue were expanded and cryopreserved. Cells were then thawed and plated alongside adult human subcutaneous and omental pre-adipocytes for subsequent differentiation and phenotypic characterization. Interscapular pre-adipocytes in cell culture differentiated into mature adipocytes that were morphologically indistinguishable from the adult white depots. Throughout differentiation, cultured human fetal interscapular adipocytes demonstrated increased expression of classical brown fat markers compared to subcutaneous and omental cells. Further, functional analysis revealed an elevation in fatty acid oxidation as well as maximal and uncoupled oxygen consumption in interscapular brown adipocytes compared to white control cells. These data collectively identify the brown phenotype of these cells. Thus, our primary cell culture system derived from non-viable human fetal interscapular brown adipose tissue provides a valuable tool for the study of human brown adipocyte biology and for the development of anti-obesity therapeutics.

Novel breast cancer metastasis-associated proteins.

With the use of the breast cancer metastatic model, which comprises four isogenic cell lines, iTRAQ-based ESI-LC/MS/MS proteomics was employed to catalog protein expression changes as cancer cells acquire increasing metastatic potential. From more than 1000 proteins detected, 197 proteins, including drug-targetable kinases, phosphatases, proteases and transcription factors, displayed differential expression when cancer cells becomes more metastatic. Overall, the number of protein expression changes was evenly distributed across mildly ( approximately 30%), moderately ( approximately 40%) and aggressively ( approximately 30%) metastatic cancer cells. Some changes were found to be specific to one while others were required for two or more phenotypes. KEGG Orthology suggests major reprogramming in cell metabolism and to smaller extents in genetic and environmental information processing. Ten novel metastasis-associated proteins were identified and the iTRAQ-based expression profiles of 7 proteins were verified to be congruent with antibody-based methods. With the use of tissue microarrays comprising 50 matched cases of invasive and metastatic lesions, the expression profiles of SH3GLB1 and SUB1, SND1, TRIM28 were validated to be down- and up-regulated, respectively, during clinical progression of carcinoma in situ to invasive and metastatic carcinomas. Our study has unraveled proteome-wide molecular aberrations and potentially new players in breast cancer metastasis.