Margo Emont
University of Chicago, IL·Physiology·Early-career
Fat tissue does more than store fat. It helps control the body's energy and blood sugar.
- Fields
Physiology
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
adipose tissue
adipocytes
fat cells
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2028
What they work on
- Track how human adipocyte subpopulations change during weight loss, using single-nucleus RNA sequencing of fat tissue collected during and after bariatric surgery.
- Map open chromatin in adipocyte subpopulations from lean and obese individuals with single-nucleus ATAC sequencing, a method that reveals which DNA regions are accessible, to find regulators of subtype identity.
- Screen signaling molecules, and use CRISPRa to switch on candidate transcriptional regulators, to try to recreate distinct human adipocyte subpopulations in vitro.
- Test how high-fat diet and cold exposure reshape human adipocyte subpopulations, using a model in which human fat cells develop inside mice.
- Compare adipocyte responses using cells from donors with different clinical traits, to separate universal responses from person-specific ones and relate them to metabolic disease.
More about the research
When overloaded, it can malfunction and lead to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes (T2D). Fat cells, called adipocytes, are not all alike. Earlier work by the PI used single-nucleus RNA sequencing (sNuc-seq), which reads the active genes in thousands of individual cells, to build an atlas of human white fat tissue. This work identified several subpopulations of adipocytes. Some of these were linked to body mass index (BMI) and predicted to be linked to metabolic disease. The two current projects ask what makes a fat cell become one subtype rather than another. They also ask how these subtypes respond to changes such as weight gain, weight loss and cold.
Why it matters
Some adipocyte subtypes are linked to body weight and type 2 diabetes risk. Learning what controls these subtypes could reveal targets for treatments that improve metabolic health in people with obesity and T2D. Knowing which fat cell responses vary from person to person may also help tailor future therapies for metabolic disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sona Kang
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Physiology
Define how FAM3D, a protein genetically linked to type 2 diabetes, suppresses heat production and mitochondrial function in mouse and human brown fat cells.
Nathan Schoettler
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Define the immune cell landscape in blood from Amish and Hutterite children using single-cell RNA sequencing, comparing cell type proportions and gene activity between the low-asthma and high-asthma farming populations.
Abeer Mohamed
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Physiology
Investigate whether glycosphingolipid-rich adiposomes, vesicles released by fat tissue, disrupt the membranes of blood vessel lining cells and cause endothelial dysfunction in obese adults with type 2 diabetes.
The school
University of Chicago: 39 labs on PI Pages, $681M a year on research, 457 research doctorates a year.
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