Nada Abumrad
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Physiology
Obesity brings complications that affect many organs, and changes in what we eat and how the body handles nutrients play a part. To understand these problems at the level of cells and molecules, researchers need specialized tools for studying fat tissue, muscle, liver and the endothelium, the cells lining blood vessels.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Biochemistry
- Topics
obesity
nutrition
adipose tissue
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2031
What they work on
- Provide adipose tissue characterization, optimized metabolism protocols, and mouse and human cell lines (preadipocytes, adipocytes, myoblasts, macrophages, endothelial cells) for mechanistic studies of obesity complications.
- Isolate and characterize extracellular vesicles (EVs), tiny cell-released packages that carry signals between cells, and develop methods to determine an EV's cell of origin and contents.
- Develop new services including 3-dimensional co-cultures, tissue-on-a-chip cultures, and metabolomic, lipidomic and proteomic analyses of cells, culture media and EVs.
- Measure adipokines, myokines, hepatokines and cytokines (signaling proteins from fat, muscle, liver and immune cells) in plasma or media using multiplex assays, and run a high-sensitivity Cytek flow cytometer.
More about the research
This grant supports a shared research core that provides those tools to investigators in a nutrition and obesity research center (NORC). The Cellular and Molecular Biology Core was set up in 2006 to help assess the structure and function of adipose tissue (body fat).
Why it matters
Obesity-related complications affect organs throughout the body. By giving researchers shared access to tools for studying fat, muscle, liver and blood-vessel cells, and how these cells communicate through extracellular vesicles, the core supports work that could clarify how obesity and disrupted nutrient metabolism cause disease. That understanding could eventually help people with obesity-associated conditions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Emanuele Cocucci
Ohio State University, OH·Biology
Perform an unbiased calibration of how the number of circulating extracellular vesicles relates to their cells of origin, using enCD63, an engineered version of the vesicle protein CD63, expressed in specific cells of genetically engineered mice.
Abeer Mohamed
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Physiology
Investigate whether glycosphingolipid-rich adiposomes, vesicles released by fat tissue, disrupt the membranes of blood vessel lining cells and cause endothelial dysfunction in obese adults with type 2 diabetes.
Larry Harshyne
Thomas Jefferson University, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Provide high-quality, affordable analysis and sorting of cells, biological particles and extracellular vesicles using fluorescence-activated flow cytometers for cancer center researchers.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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