Michael Lehmann, UA professor of biological sciences, is the lead researcher on work that could provide some insight into how to regulate human metabolisms.
“We have discovered a gene, that if we knock this gene down, we basically produce fat-free fly larvae; little maggots that you can look through, are transparent, because they don’t contain, or contain very little, fat tissue,” Lehmann said. “That’s the same gene that controls fat metabolism in humans as well.”
“The gene that we’ve found in these flies is present in humans as well, so most likely the gene has the same weight function in humans,” Lehmann said. “We can use the gene in the flies to see how the protein is regulated; how it’s activated or repressed. More often than not, it turns out that what we find in flies also applies in humans.”
The research on metabolism is important because obesity has become a worldwide problem, Lehmann said.
“Obesity has become a problem in not just the U.S., but the entire industrialized world,” Lehmann said.
For adults, overweight and obesity ranges are determined by using weight and height to calculate Body Mass Index, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
BMI consistently correlates with a person’s amount of body fat. An adult who has a BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight; 30 or higher is considered obese.
About 34 percent of adults in the U.S. are obese, according to the CDCP.
“People are becoming more and more overweight, and not just overweight, but morbidly obese,” Lehmann said. “Some people would say ‘just eat less,’ but in some cases, that just doesn’t work because these people have metabolisms that are so deranged. We have to take a medical approach and try to help these people.”
The research is being supported primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Arkansas Bioscience Institute, Lehmann said.
“We have been working on this since 2007 and just received a new grant this year from the NSF for another three years,” Lehmann said. “I hope, though, we will be able to continue our metabolism work beyond those three years. There is lots of work to be done.”
Fruit flies were the optimum choice for the research.
“Fruit flies have been used for pretty much exactly a hundred years now as model organisms in genetics research,” Lehmann said. “Because they are such a good model organism, they have many advantages over other organisms. Especially in genetics, because if you want to use a quantitative approach, you need a lot of offspring. A single female fruit fly can have 800 little fly babies. They also have a very short life cycle, so you get from one generation to the next in eleven days, so they’re very suitable for experimentation.”
Fruit flies are useful for a variety of scientific studies.
“The fly can be used to study many aspects of biology, that are also relevant to human biology, which surprises many people, because you wouldn’t necessarily expect this because they are so different from us,” Lehmann said. “It turns out that the basic processes, even in development, are very similar.”