Adipose tissue (Fat) regulates body energy homeostasis through the balance between energy storage and expenditure.  White Adipose Tissue (WAT) stores and releases energy during eating and fasting but also is more recently recognized as a vital, complex endocrine organ.  Brown Adipose Tissue (BAT), which was recently characterized in adults, is activated upon cold exposure and high calorie diet which causes it to burn large amounts of energy, through a unique mechanism.  We aim to understand how WAT and BAT uptake and consume a variety of nutrients (e.g. lipid, glucose and amino acids) in order to understand metabolic diseases due to energy imbalance, such as obesity and diabetes. Our long-term goal is to use this knowledge to prevent metabolic diseases including obesity, fatty liver and diabetes, and certain type of cancer. 

Metabolism and signaling pathways have long been studied separately, but recent advances in the field clearly show they are strongly connected.  For example, nutrient- and hormone-sensing signaling pathways (e.g. mTOR, Insulin, Growth factors) actively regulate cellular metabolism. Further, metabolism directly regulates gene expression by providing metabolites such as Acetyl-CoA (Histone acetylation) and S-Adenosyl-Methionine (a.k.a. SAM, DNA/Histone methylation) which can be used to epigenetically alter DNA/chromatin packaging and gene expression.  Thus, we are interested in identifying mechanisms by which metabolic pathways and signaling pathways collaborate to regulate biological processes.