Decoding the enigma of fasting in liver and adipose lipid metabolism

Summary

Fasting is generally considered as the wilful refrain from eating and sometimes drinking， while prolonged or involuntary fasting leads to starvation. Throughout human evolution, the ability to adapt to food scarcity was crucial for survival. An intricate network of evolutionarily conserved transcriptional, translational, and post-translational regulatory mechanisms underlie these adaptive responses and provide the basis for the survival of periods of famine. However, in the modern world of caloric excess, these once-beneficial adaptations contribute to the rise of obesity and related metabolic diseases. Further understanding of the regulatory mechanisms of fasting is essential for designing effective strategies to combat obesity and associated metabolic diseases. My PhD research aims to characterise a number of transcriptional and translation regulatory mechanisms relevant to acute fasting and recurrent fasting and gain deeper insight into the regulatory mechanisms of fasting, focusing on the liver and adipose tissue.