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Confounding issues in the ‘humanized’ BAT of mice

Nature Metabolism volume 2, pages 303–304 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 13 April 2020

The Original Article was published on 19 August 2019

arising from J. M. A. de Jong et al. Nature Metabolism https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-019-0101-4 (2019)

A recent study by de Jong et al.1 reports the molecular analysis of brown adipose tissue (BAT) in mice kept under a thermoneutral condition (at 30 °C) on a high-fat diet (45% fat) for over 20 weeks. The authors claim that these mice are therefore ‘humanized’ in regard to their cellular composition in BAT. The authors conclude that the morphology and molecular characteristics of interscapular BAT from these mice are somewhat similar to those of human BAT. However, these conclusions are confounded by the following flaws.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UCSF Diabetes Center and Department of Cell and Tissue Biology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

    Shingo Kajimura

  2. Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Bruce M. Spiegelman

Authors
  1. Shingo Kajimura
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  2. Bruce M. Spiegelman
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Contributions

S.K. and B.M.S. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shingo Kajimura or Bruce M. Spiegelman.

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Kajimura, S., Spiegelman, B.M. Confounding issues in the ‘humanized’ BAT of mice. Nat Metab 2, 303–304 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-020-0192-y

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