Investigating how cellular mechanisms interface to maintain energy balance

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Project Summary:  Organisms, from bacteria to humans, modulate their food intake and energy expenditure in accordance with their internal nutrient state, allowing for maintenance of healthy energy balance. During evolution conserved homeostatic mechanisms developed to cope with potential nutrient deprivation from a fluctuating food supply. Hence when food was plentiful the excess energy is stored as fat reserves, which can be mobilized during a future scarcity. However, in the 21st century nutritional scarcity is the exception rather than the norm, resulting in an increasing prevalence of obesity in humans. Obesity impacts progression of cancer and neurodegeneration, accelerates aging and impedes a healthy lifestyle. Previously, a number of studies focused on how organisms respond to nutritional scarcity, and have resulted in elucidation of evolutionarily conserved mechanisms that orchestrate a response to food scarcity. Our aim is to understand the opposite nutritional state, by focusing on how organisms respond to chronic ‘over-nutrition’. We expect that these mechanisms will be both short-range, acute, local cell biological changes and also prolonged time-scale, inter- organ systemic physiological responses. Thus far, we identified previously uncharacterized surplus signaling components. Unexpectedly we found molecules that are critical for scarcity responses, are also key regulators of nutritional surplus. Given that storage of surplus evolved as a protective strategy to survive future nutritional scarcity, it is likely that an overlapping set of molecules is employed to allow organisms to sense and respond to these two mutually exclusive states. Premised on our observations, we hypothesize that a suite of ‘bidirectional’ switch proteins couple scarcity and surplus mechanisms, allowing organisms to toggle between the two as needed. We further surmise that chronic nutrient surplus, a state that was rare during the evolution, impairs the capacity of this ‘bidirectional molecular switch’ to efficiently alternate in response to nutritional state, resulting in energy imbalance. Our short-term goal is to a) codify the molecular suite underpinning the bidirectional nutritional switch; b) identify new bidirectional nutrient switches that facilitate inter-organ communication required for energy balance. Then, in the medium-term we will c) systematically dissect how the bidirectional mechanisms degrade and lose plasticity when subject to chronic nutrient surplus. Finally, our long-term goal is to d) develop pharmaceutical interventions that target the bidirectional molecular suite, and test their effect in restoring energy balance in systems that have been nutritionally stressed. The fundamental principles we derive from this work will illuminate how molecular components designed to function in a certain physiological state can be co-opted to achieve an antagonistic response. The principles garnered from our studies will be applicable to understanding how viruses hijack immune cells, or explain how cancerous cells trick cell-death pathways and over-proliferate. Ultimately our goal is to address outstanding issues in energy physiology, by adopting a comprehensive and conceptually novel approach, in a highly tractable model.