Weißes Fettgewebe

White adipose tissue is the body‘s largest store of energy. Depending on the water content, up to 8000 kcal can be stored per kilogram of adipose tissue (Bozenraad 1911; Buenger 1929). The development of this specialized connective tissue during the evolution of vertebrates made independence from a constant supply of food possible. In addition to this function, white adipose tissue serves for padding mechanically stressed areas or organs, but also for thermal insulation. It reacts extremely plastically to the energy supply from food and, in addition to the energy metabolism, also controls the immune and reproductive functions of mammals. Despite their comparatively uniform morphology, white adipocytes perform different functions depending on their localization in the body. The starting point of modern adipose tissue research were observations made in the Jackson animal laboratory in Maine (USA) in 1949, where a hereditary extreme form of obesity was described in a wild-type colony of mice. The designation of this mouse strain as „obese“ led to the naming of the first obesity gene identified (ob). The ob mouse lacks a hormone circulating in the blood that could be transferred to it from lean mice. The protein encoded by the ob gene was named „leptin“ because of its slimming effects. The cloning of the ob-gene was published in 1994 (Zhang et al. 1994).