Given the extreme toll obesity takes on nearly all body systems, Western Michigan University’s Ferrario, Peter Wolbrecht, PhD, and their colleagues are using rat models to understand possible brain differences between animals that Suffer from overeating and obesity. and those who are not.
Previous research from Ferrario’s lab pointed to differences in the nucleus accumbens in obesity-prone and obesity-resistant mice. Their latest study, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, tracked what was happening in the brain in real time when these animals were presented with glucose, a type of sugar, that was labeled with a tracer. The tracer allowed the researchers to measure this new sugar in the brain.
Sugar is the brain’s main fuel source and once there the molecule is broken down and used to make new molecules such as glutamine, glutamate and GABA, each playing an important role in influencing the activation of neurons in the brain and nervous system.
“The glucose that is consumed gets broken down and then its carbons get attached to the neurotransmitters. We see the labeled carbons appearing in those molecules — glutamate, glutamine and GABA — over time,” explained Volbrecht. “