Biologists at the University of California, Riverside have found that voluntary activity, such as daily exercise, is a highly heritable trait that can be passed down genetically to successive generations. Working on mice in the lab, they found that activity level can be enhanced with “selective breeding”- the process of breeding plants and animals for particular genetic traits…

METABOLIC DISEASE: Childhood obesity: possible new insight from mice Given the current ‘epidemic’ of obesity and its related diseases (including type 2 diabetes and heart disease), understanding how food intake, body composition, and energy expenditure are regulated has become a research priority. One soluble molecule found to regulate all these processes, and more, is leptin…

Mice that are missing a protein involved in the response to low oxygen stay lean and healthy, even on a high-fat diet, a new study has found. “They process fat differently,” said Randall Johnson, professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, who directed the research, which is published in the April 15 issue of the journal Cell Metabolism…

Increased appetite and insulin resistance can be transferred from one mouse to another via intestinal bacteria, according to research being published online this week by Science magazine…

HealthDay - THURSDAY, March 4 (HealthDay News) — Intestinal bacteria may
contribute to obesity and metabolic syndrome, a new study in mice
suggests.

Overeating in mice triggers a molecule once considered to be only involved in detecting and fighting viruses to also destroy normal metabolism, leading to insulin resistance and setting the stage for diabetes…

A Université de Montréal research team is developing a pill composed of leptin, the protein that tells our brain to stop eating. “Mice deprived of leptin will not stop eating. They become so big they have trouble moving around,” says Moïse Bendayan, a pathology professor at the Université de Montréal Faculty of Medicine who has studied the leptin protein extensively…

Obesity comes with plenty of health risks, but there’s one that’s perhaps not so well known: an increased risk of developing cancer, and especially certain types of cancer like liver cancer. Now, a group of researchers reporting in the January 22nd issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, have confirmed in mice that obesity does indeed act as a “bona fide tumor promoter…

Shutting down an energy-controlling mechanism in mice left them leaner than normal mice and could be a new way to fight obesity in humans, US researchers said in a study published Tuesday.(AFP/File/Paul Ellis)AFP - Shutting down an energy-controlling mechanism in mice left them leaner than normal mice and could be a new way to fight obesity in humans, US researchers said in a study published Tuesday.

The chance discovery of a genetic mutation that makes mice enormously fat but protects them from diabetes has given researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, USA, new insights into the cellular mechanisms that link obesity to Type 2 diabetes. Dr Gerald Denis and his colleagues report their findings in the current issue of The Biochemical Journal…

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