I am quite confused about the definition of cold or other stimuli-induced brown adipose tissue. Does it equal to beige adipose tissue? In this case, the "brown fat" we are now talking about is beige? Or is the classification kind of based on morphology and thus lacking of clear distinguishing features?
Hi Yinyun,
There are classical BAT in adult humans, and it is activated by cold. The same type of stimuli can induces white fat to become "beige", or "brite" (brown/white). Rosiglitazone is a PPAR agonist that can induce this white to brown conversion. The difference is that a white fat cell attains some of the characteristics of a brown fat cell, but not all of them. There is still a clear difference between brown and beige and a white fat cell does not seem to be able to fully convert to brown (at least as far as we low right now). Attached a good review
Article Brown and beige fat: Development, function and therapeutic potential
Thanks for your detailed explanation. What about the visceral fat? When we are talking about the benefits of subcutaneous fat having something to do with its possibility to the detectable beige adipocytes, but it seems different for visceral fat. It's interesting to discuss about their characteristics and potential relationship.
The origins of beige cells is still an ongoing debate. Some evidence points to beige (inducible) cells being converted white adipocytes; other evidence suggests that there is a population of cells in WAT that can differentiate to beige cells under appropriate stimulation (see paper by Wang et al). To complicate things further, much of the evidence to date is in rodent models and translation to humans is not straight forward. The supraclavicular BAT depot appears to be the largest most significant BAT depot in humans (see Sacks & Symonds) and is presumed to be "classical" BAT but may behave more like the inducible BAT seen in rodents.
Article Anatomical Locations of Human Brown Adipose Tissue: Function...
Article Tracking adipogenesis during white adipose tissue developmen...
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