Label-Free Detection of Lipid Accumulation in Cells Using Magnetic Levitation.

Dysfunction in adipose tissue can cause serious health problems, including obesity, type-2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, significantly reducing human life expectancy. Differences in differentiation and lipid accumulation in adipocytes reflect their functional status, making it important to characterize adipocytes by monitoring biophysical changes during adipogenic differentiation. However, there is currently no specific cell surface marker to separate mature adipocytes from non-adipose cells based on their lipid content, and separation of mature adipocytes is challenging due to handling limitations without fixation, antibody staining, or particle conjugation.

Functional Investigations of HNF1A Identify Rare Variants as Risk Factors for Type 2 Diabetes in the General Population.

Variants in HNF1A encoding hepatocyte nuclear factor 1α (HNF-1A) are associated with maturity-onset diabetes of the young form 3 (MODY 3) and type 2 diabetes. We investigated whether functional classification of HNF1A rare coding variants can inform models of diabetes risk prediction in the general population by analyzing the effect of 27 HNF1A variants identified in well-phenotyped populations (n = 4,115). Bioinformatics tools classified 11 variants as likely pathogenic and showed no association with diabetes risk (combined minor allele frequency [MAF] 0.