New Protein Structure Discovery Could Lead To Obesity Treatments

They claimed that the research, which was published in the journal Science Advances, may one day help fight obesity and diseases like diabetes.

Brown fat is healthy fat because it metabolises blood sugar and fat molecules to produce heat and support body temperature regulation. However, the majority of our fat is white fat, which stores energy and contributes to obesity when there is an excess of it.

According to Paul Crichton of the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, “UCP1 is the key protein that enables the specialised brown fat to burn off calories as heat.”

”But even with more brown fat—UCP1 must still be ‘switched on’ to gain full benefit. And research has been hampered by a lack of details on the molecular make up of UCP1. Despite more than 40 years of research, we did not know what UCP1 looks like to understand how it works—until now,” Crichton said.

The team was able to examine UCP1 in atomic detail using the Krios G3i, a cryogenic electron microscope at the University of Pennsylvania’s Singh Center for Nanotechnology.

According to Vera Moiseenkova-Bell, an associate professor at the Beckman Center for Cryo-Electron Microscopy in the US, “This is an exciting development that follows more than four decades of research into what UCP1 looks like and how it functions.”

”Our work shows how a regulator binds to prevent UCP1 activity, but more importantly the structure will allow scientists to rationalise how activating molecules bind to switch the protein on, leading to the burning of fat,” said lead researcher Edmund Kunji, from the University of Cambridge.

”The activated tissue can also remove glucose from the blood, which can help control diabetes,” he added.