What obese fruit flies may tell us about the evolution of cold tolerance
When you remove THADA, then the cells store more fat and produce less heat. When you restore THADA function, the cells store less fat and burn more energy," explains study co-author Aurelio Teleman of the German Cancer Research Center ( DKFZ ) in Heidelberg, Germany. "It's a metabolic regulator that affects the balance between how much energy your body turns into fat versus how much of it gets burned." When the researchers tested obese flies' response to cold by putting them in a walk-in refrigerator, they found that they were less able to cope. At near freezing temperatures, fruit flies "pass out," but when the researchers returned cold-immobilized flies to a warmer room, THADA knockout flies took longer to "wake up" than their wild-type counterparts. That result surprised study co-author Alexandra Moraru of DKFZ. "We suspected that fatter animals would have better insulation and be more resistant to the cold, but in this case, they ...