Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigation of the Evolution of Human Adipocytes

人类在饮食、代谢特征和疾病易感性方面与其他现存灵长类动物不同，但人们对这些差异是如何产生的或这些差异背后的遗传机制知之甚少。本博士论文项目将使用比较灵长类动物模型来研究人类进化过程中脂肪细胞中的基因表达是如何变化的，以及饮食在这些基因表达差异中的作用。这项研究将有助于我们越来越多地了解人类进化起源、独特的人类特征和现代人类健康和疾病风险之间的重要关系，并将与进化人类学和营养与代谢的临床研究相关。该项目将支持研究生和本科生在STEM研究方面的培训和指导，以及公共科学推广活动和新数据和技术的传播。代谢特征和饮食在人类进化过程中尤为重要，在当今许多常见的人类疾病和慢性疾病中发挥着重要作用。该项目利用几种最先进的技术来解决有关人类饮食和新陈代谢进化的进化问题。研究人员将使用来自人类和其他灵长类动物的诱导多能干细胞来研究脂肪细胞中控制基因表达的调控区域。大量平行报告基因试验将用于确定这些调控区域的活性。基因表达对不同饮食成分（如ω -3和ω -6脂肪酸）的反应变化也将被测量。

Humans differ from other living primates in terms of diet, metabolic traits, and disease susceptibilities, yet little is known about how these differences arose or the genetic mechanisms underlying these differences. This doctoral dissertation project will use a comparative primate model to investigate how gene expression in fat cells has changed during human evolution and the role of diet in these gene expression differences. The research will contribute to our growing understanding of important relationships among human evolutionary origins, uniquely human traits, and health and disease risks in modern humans, and will be relevant to evolutionary anthropology and clinical research on nutrition and metabolism. The project will support graduate and undergraduate student training and mentoring in STEM research, as well as public science outreach activities and dissemination of novel data and techniques.Metabolic traits and diet were of particular importance during human evolution and play a role in many common human diseases and chronic conditions today. This project utilizes several state-of-the-art techniques to address evolutionary questions about the evolution of diet and metabolism in humans. The investigators will use induced pluripotent stem cells from humans and other primate species to investigate regulatory regions controlling gene expression in adipocytes. A massively parallel reporter assay will be used to determine the activity of these regulatory regions. Changes in gene expression in response to different dietary components such as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids will also be measured.