Research Paper Volume 15, Issue 10 pp 4319—4333
Plasticity of adipose tissues in response to fasting and refeeding declines with aging in mice
- 1 National Clinical Research Center for Metabolic Diseases, Hunan Provincial Key Laboratory for Metabolic Bone Diseases, and Department of Metabolism and Endocrinology, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha 410011, Hunan, China
- 2 Department of Laboratory Medicine, The Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410011, Hunan, China
- 3 Department of Endocrinology, The First People's Hospital of Huaihua, Huaihua 418000, Hunan, China
Received: September 20, 2022 Accepted: May 10, 2023 Published: May 23, 2023
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.204734How to Cite
Copyright: © 2023 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
To explore the plasticity of adipose tissues, C57BL/6J mice at the age of 1 month, 3 months, and 15 months corresponding to adolescence, adulthood, and middle-aged transitional period, respectively, were fasted and refed subsequently at different times. Body adipose tissues ratio (BATR) was calculated, the morphology of adipose tissue and the area of adipocytes were observed by histological analysis, and the mitochondria in adipocytes were observed under the transmission electron microscope. Furthermore, the expression levels of Ucp-1, Cidea, Cox7a1, Cpt-1m, Atgl, and Hsl were detected by qRT-PCR. Our results showed a significant increase in the adipocytes area and body visceral adipose tissue (VAT) ratio in all groups of mice with aging. Moreover, body mesenteric white adipose tissue (mWAT) ratio decreased the most after 72 h fasting. In the middle-aged transitional mice, the white adipocytes did not decrease until 72 h fasting, and most of them still appeared as unaffected unilocular cells. Besides, the number of mitochondria and the expression of Ucp-1, Cidea, Cox7a1, Cpt-1m, Atgl and Hsl were lower in these mice. After 72h refeeding, the body subcutaneous white adipose tissue (sWAT) ratio returned to normal, while the VAT kept decreasing. The above results indicated an impairment in adipose tissue plasticity in mice with aging, suggesting that age modulated the metabolic adaptiveness of adipose tissues in mice.