Unlike animals, plants have the ability to very rapidly convert stored fat into energy. This is because, when they germinate from seeds, plants need to quickly convert stored fat into energy.
The enzymes that allow this process to occur are called a “glyoxylate shunt.” A team of biological engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles realized that such an ability to covert fat to energy would be useful in animals.
Fat no more?
Especially obese animals.
And their experiment, published this week in Cell Metabolism, highlights the growing technological tool box scientists have to tinker with biology. What they did was fascinating, promising and a little bit scary.
The researchers cloned genes from E. coli that enable plants’ shunt mechanism, and then inserted those genes into the area — mitochondria — of mice cells that burn fat and convert it into energy. The genetically modified mice burned fat much more quickly than unmodified mice.
Then they experimented with the new mice, and researchers fed the tiny mammals a diet composed of 60 percent fat. (Think: Cheesburgers and French Fries for breakfast, lunch and dinner.) Yet after six weeks the mice remained skinny.
Thus you can begin to see the potential for a similar treatment in humans. The potential for treating fat people — or even giving normal-weight people the ability to eat whatever they want — is tremendous.
But so are the consequences. Do we want to enable a society to consume even more food? Do we want to tinker this way with our genes? What unexpected biological consequences might result from the ability to convert fat to energy twice as fast in humans?
These are serious issues. But if we can perform transforming surgery on humans like bariatric procedures, I believe engineering metabolic pathways in humans at least merits a look.