Manipulating the activity of ‘stretch-sensitive’ ion channels in neurons innervating the digestive system of fruit flies has dramatic effects on food intake, suggesting that these ion channels could be targets for drugs to help tackle obesity.
In early Drosophila embryos, histone H2Av continuously exchanges between cytoplasmic lipid droplets, a process that modulates H2Av import into nuclei and constitutes a novel post-translational strategy to regulate nuclear H2Av levels.
Diffusion-MRI-based cerebral cortical microstructure encoding regionally differential dendritic arborization and synaptic formation at birth robustly predicts future 2-year-old cognitive and language outcomes with regionally heterogeneous contribution that exhibits functional selectivity.
An interaction between the brown fat protein CIDEA and the phospholipid phosphatidic acid is vital for the expansion of intracellular lipid droplets for energy storage.
Seipin oligomers dynamically interact with small, nascent lipid droplets near the endoplasmic reticulum to convert them into larger, mature lipid droplets in a newly identified step of lipid droplet formation.
In parallel to protein-driven processes, characteristic physicochemical properties of the endoplasmic reticulum membrane modulate intracellular fat accumulation and lipid droplet formation.
The targeting of proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum to lipid droplets relies on surface modulation of the lipid droplet by the Arf1/COPI machinery.