ABOVE: Mouse heart cells that have taken up adipocyte-derived extracellular vesicles (stained red)
CLAIR CREWE
If fat cells become metabolically stressed and dysfunctional, they start churning out chunks of mitochondria that serve as warning signals to the heart of potential catastrophe, suggest the authors of a paper published in Cell Metabolism today (August 20). The mitochondrial signals cause a burst of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in heart cells that seems to prime and protect the organ against future insult.
“It’s a fascinating observation,” says Scott Summers, a diabetes and metabolism researcher at the University of Utah who was not involved with the project. “I think we’re all going to be watching to see if this [mitochondrial shuttling] ends up being a major regulatory pathway by which organs change their behavior.”
“And the fact that they saw this as eliciting a protective effect in the heart,” he adds, “that’s pretty interesting.”
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