Considering that the main biological function of adipose tissue is to manage lipid storage and metabolism, it is also important to understand how adipocyte size affects selleck products FA uptake and its regulation by insulin. Here, we applied a single-cell microscopy assay to determine how FA uptake and insulin sensitivity correlated with the size of individual adipocytes in subcutaneous adipose tissue. Traditional radioactive techniques are based on the measurement of glucose and FA uptake in fragments of adipose tissue, representing the average response of a potentially heterogeneous population of adipocytes. The method developed in the present study offers a significant advantage over the standard approach for the measurement of FA uptake using radioactive FA analogs (5).

This microscopy-based approach allows both a single-cell and a population response to be quantified in microscopic quantities of adipose tissue obtained from microbiopsies or laparoscopic surgeries. Furthermore, the metabolic state, cell size, hormonal responsiveness, and potentially other biochemical and spatiotemporal parameters such as gene expression, protein levels, and the rates of metabolic reactions can be measured simultaneously at a single-cell level. Because organotypic cultures of adipose tissue retain morphological and biochemical properties of adipose tissue (39, 43), and the time delay between tissue extraction and hormonal treatments is minimal, it is likely that the fat explants used in the present study more closely resemble the true state of adipose tissue in vivo.

In contrast, collagenase-treated dissociated cultures of primary adipocytes may lose their native properties due to a loss of cell-cell contacts, cell lysis, a proper three-dimensional substrate, and long postextraction manipulations. The main findings of the present study are that small adipocytes are insulin sensitive, whereas large adipocytes are typically less responsive, and that adipose tissue can contain a heterogeneous population of adipocytes that differ in size and insulin sensitivity within the same anatomic location. In all three subcutaneous depots evaluated in this study, adipocytes with an average cell size larger than 80�C100 ��m were insulin insensitive. Previous studies in humans have reported that subcutaneous fat contains two populations of cells with sizes of 20�C50 and 100�C120 ��m in diameter, and only small differences in size were found between insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant individuals (29).

Unfortunately, the technical limitations of those studies preclude the direct estimation of the insulin sensitivity of individual adipocytes present in adipose tissue. It is still possible that, Dacomitinib within the same animal and anatomic location, small adipocytes are more insulin sensitive than large adipocytes.