Poster #: 109
Lipid droplet downregulation facilitates neural stem cell heat resilience
Mentors: Wei I. Jiang, PhD (Mentor), Dengke K. Ma, PhD (PI)
Our planet is warming, and heat stroke might become a more prominent cause of mortality worldwide, but its pathogenic mechanism in physiology and pathology in stem cells is not well understood. Here, we subjected mouse neural stem cells to a high temperature of 45 degrees Celsius and found that lipid droplets were significantly downregulated compared to a normal temperature of 37 degrees Celsius, suggesting that lipid droplets may be involved in the heat stress response. Next, we investigated the function of lipid droplets under heat stress. We found that using the chemical TOFA ((5-(Tetradecyloxy)-2-furoic acid), a competitive inhibitor of acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), to block lipid biosynthesis, thereby downregulating lipid droplets, can protect mouse neural stem cells, as shown by the membrane abnormality assay under heat stress conditions. Collectively, these data highlight that targeting lipid droplets is a potential pathway to enhance stem cell resilience to high temperature.