Endocrine Abstracts

The advent of mice as the most common animal used for metabolic studies was caused by the possibility to perform gene manipulations in this species (which first very recently has become possible in the previously most studied animal: the rat). Although the mouse in many ways would seem just to be a smaller version of the rat, the smaller size indirectly has added a confounding factor to interpretation of metabolic studies. The reason is that the environmental temperatures unde...

The focus of this talk is on how disruptions in the ability of organisms to appropriately store and release lipid can impact on whole organism metabolic health. The talk focuses predominantly on murine phenotyping and discusses how observations from mice can be related to human data.Both healthy mice and humans preferentially use carbohydrate in the fed state and switch to utilising a greater degree of lipid in fasted state. The ability to perform the sw...

The liver is a relay station for fatty acid metabolism. Perturbations in hepatic fatty acid metabolism have the potential to impact widely on metabolic health. The accumulation or loss of liver fat (hepatocyte triacylglycerol (TG)) represents the balance between input pathways and removal pathways. In health these pathways must be closely balanced; imbalance will lead to changes in liver fat content. The concept of hepatic fatty acid partitioning is that fatty acids within the...