Articles in 2024

A new study reveals that subcellular NAD⁺ pools are interconnected, with mitochondria acting as a buffer to maintain NAD⁺-dependent processes in overconsuming organelles, highlighting the critical role of mitochondria in NAD⁺ homeostasis.

By increasing NAD⁺ consumption in various organelles, mitochondria are revealed to act as buffers that help maintain subcellular NAD⁺ levels. At the same time, cells are found to be particularly sensitive to a decline in NAD⁺ levels originating from mitochondria themselves.

This proof-of-concept study shows that 1 hour of cold exposure with shivering for 10 consecutive days improves glucose tolerance and other metabolic health outcomes in humans with overweight or obesity.

Sellers, van Beek and colleagues show that intermittent cold exposure for 10 days, which induced 1 h of shivering per day, improves glucose homeostasis, lipid metabolism and blood pressure in adults with overweight or obesity.

Combining rabies-based connectomics with single-nucleus transcriptomics, the authors identify a neural circuit through which GLP-1 receptor agonists suppress appetite in mice.

Nam et al. show that limited glucose availability similar to the tumour microenvironment confers resistance against chemotherapeutic drugs that target DNA synthesis.

Castells-Nobau et al. provide insight into how bacteriophages in the gut microbiome contribute to regulating food addiction by modulating tryptophan and tyrosine metabolism in the host.

The insulin inhibitory receptor (inceptor) is found to bind to insulin and to regulate insulin stores by directing proinsulin and insulin towards lysosomal degradation.

Cushing’s syndrome, a condition of chronic glucocorticoid excess, disrupts metabolic homeostasis, driving fat redistribution and promoting insulin resistance. New research uses a series of elegant approaches to reveal acyl-CoA-binding protein (ACBP) as a mediator of the metabolic disturbances associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels in mice.

In this Review, the authors highlight cancer cachexia as a complex and multifactorial disorder, and discuss the underlying host-driven and tumour-driven metabolic changes, therapeutic opportunities and the pertinent challenges in the treatment of cancer cachexia.

The authors highlight the role of acyl coenzyme A binding protein (encoded by DBI) in Cushing’s syndrome by using six different inhibition methods and mapping the physiological effects.

The NAD⁺ synthesis enzyme NAMPT is shown to possess additional enzymatic activity as a phosphoribosylase, which restricts the virion incorporation of viral proteins and underpins its antiviral effect

Despite their abundance and despite being the most numerous biological entities on Earth, viruses remain one of the least understood components of the human microbiome. In our study, we show how Microviridae bacteriophages in the gut microbiome are associated with food addiction through changes in tryptophan, serotonin and dopamine metabolism.

The authors show how genetic variants of the human circadian clock gene PER3 are related to winter depression. In mice, under shorter light exposure, such variants enhance glucocorticoid signalling, inhibiting serotonin production and leading to depression-like behaviours.

Here, we introduce Artificial Intelligence Ready and Equitable Atlas for Diabetes Insights (AI-READI), a multidisciplinary data-generation project designed to create and share a multimodal dataset optimized for artificial intelligence research in type 2 diabetes mellitus.

A new study finds that capillary vessels become obstructed in diabetes and that their dysfunction may cause microvascular damage and lead to cognitive deficits. Such obstruction is independent of the elevated blood sugar found in diabetes and is triggered by elevated interleukin-10 cytokine signalling in cerebral blood vessel endothelial cells.