BioCentury
ARTICLE | Preclinical News

PPAR agonist-induced fatty acid metabolism boosts tissue regeneration

May 4, 2018 11:23 PM UTC

Scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper in Cell Stem Cell showing that fatty acid oxidation (FAO) induced by short-term fasting promotes tissue regeneration and repair, and that those effects can be emulated with PPAR delta agonists.

Intestinal tissues undergo constant turnover mediated by intestinal stem cells (ISCs) that reside at the base of intestinal crypts, and the rate of intestinal tissue regeneration has been shown to decrease in old age. Previous studies have shown that long-term caloric restriction increases the turnover rate of intestinal tissue and that high-fat diets, which increase FAO, augment ISC activity via PPAR delta signaling...