Understanding How Adipose Tissue Adapts—and Why It Fails

Healthy tissues are not static—they continually adapt. Throughout life, tissues remodel, regenerate, and reorganize themselves in response to physiological demand. Our laboratory seeks to understand the cellular principles that preserve this adaptive capacity and why it is progressively lost during aging and metabolic disease. Using adipose tissue as a model system, we investigate how progenitor, stromal, immune, vascular, and neural cells coordinate tissue adaptation across the lifespan.

Our Perspective

Healthy tissues continuously adapt to changing physiological and nutritional demands. This adaptive capacity is essential for maintaining tissue function throughout life and depends on coordinated interactions among progenitor, stromal, immune, vascular, and neural cell populations. During aging and metabolic disease, these interactions become disrupted, leading to impaired tissue remodeling and function.

Our research focuses on understanding how these cellular interactions regulate tissue adaptation. Using adipose tissue as a model system, we investigate the mechanisms that establish, maintain, and restore adaptive tissue function through integrated genetic, imaging, lineage tracing, and physiological approaches.

Our goal is to define the cellular mechanisms that preserve adaptive tissue function and determine how their disruption contributes to aging and metabolic disease. Although our work is centered on adipose tissue, we believe the biological principles that govern tissue adaptation are likely to extend across multiple organ systems.

Our Scientific Questions

The Central Question

How do tissues preserve adaptive capacity throughout life?

1.Adaptive remodeling

Question: How do tissues respond appropriately to physiological challenge?

Summary: Adipose tissue continuously remodels in response to nutrient availability, environmental conditions, and energetic stress. We seek to understand the mechanisms that preserve this adaptive capacity and why tissue remodeling becomes impaired during obesity and aging. We further aim to identify how these mechanisms preserve metabolic resilience and determine why adaptive responses fail under physiological stress.

2. Tissue Niches

Question: How is adaptive behavior organized within local cellular environments?

Summary: Cells exist within specialized microenvironments that regulate growth, repair, and adaptation. We investigate how tissue niches coordinate cellular behavior and how alterations in these local environments constrain regenerative capacity and metabolic health.

3. Cellular Communication

Question: How do progenitor, stromal, immune, vascular, and neural cells coordinate tissue adaptation?

Summary: Adipose tissue function emerges through communication between stromal, immune, vascular, and progenitor cells. We study how these signaling networks coordinate tissue remodeling and how disruption of cellular communication contributes to disease.

4. Progenitor Competence

Question: How do progenitor cells sustain tissue renewal throughout life?

Summary: Tissue adaptation depends on progenitor cells that can respond appropriately to physiological challenge. Our research investigates how progenitor competence is established, maintained, and ultimately lost during aging and metabolic stress.