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One Signal Makes Stem Cells into Fat Cells

Posted on: Monday, 21 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

U.S. researchers said a key signal in mice tells stem cells to commit to becoming fat cells in the body.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that adding a single protein, called BMP4, induced mouse stem cells to become fat cells. A very similar signal is likely to be involved in humans, too, they said.

Fat cells, or adipocytes, store the body's excess energy both by increasing their size by stuffing themselves full of fat, and by increasing their number. Stem cells are cellular reserves that hang around until told to change into another, more specialized type of cell.

To see if BMP4 could direct stem cells to become fat in culture dishes, the researchers treated cells with this suspected, but not yet proven fat-commitment protein. They found if the treated stem cells are pushed pushed a little more, they uniformly became fat cells.

Stem cells not exposed to BMP4 did not become fat cells when pushed with a cocktail of differentiation-inducers that the researchers had previously shown makes pre-fat cells convert into fat cells.

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