Adipose Tissue Core

The University of Michigan Adipose Tissue Core gathers experts from different laboratories across campus researching diabetes, obesity, and adipocyte biology.

This joint laboratory core offers a large panel of experts of in vitro and in vivo adipose biology experiments. Our core can provide council on cell culture, differentiation, transfection and infection with virus, protein and RNA purification, lipolysis, Seahorse assays, glucose uptake assays, and tissue and cellular stains including Oil Red-O, Nile Red, Geimsa, and H&E stainings. Our group also offers expertise in animal experiments including glucose tolerance tests, insulin tolerance tests, tissue collection, drug injection, and many others.

Our services include:

• Consultation services on your current research, such as providing guidelines on general strategies or technical aspects, suggesting new paths of research, reviewing specific aims based on our experience in the field of adipocyte function and regulation.
• Protocols and reagents we have gathered related to the study of adipocytes can be shared upon request, demonstrated in our laboratory, or performed as a service.
• Up to date lists of material are available for our customers: primers for qRT-PCR analysis of adipose genes, antibody references, various plasmids, viral vectors, mesenchymal precursors cells (including UCP-1), as well as transgenic and knock-out mice.
• Samples have been processed for protein and RNA analysis and are available upon request from the database of tissues collected from mice fed with normal chow or high fat diet chow established by our core
• Work with a panel of transgenic mice, which are available to address your specific questions if your study could benefit from the in vivo experiments.
• Expertise in explant culture, more specifically ear mesenchymal stem cell culturing.
• Generation of cell models from our transgenic animals can be provide upon request.
• An RNA-sequencing database is being generated and will be available shortly. 

In addition, the core provides the infrastructure, expertise and training for in vitro studies of cellular and mitochondrial metabolism via a Seahorse XF Analyzer.

Seahorse XF Analyzer

The Seahorse XF instrument is used to assess extracellular O2, pH, glucose and lactate fluxes to provide estimates of glucose utilization in cells and tissues.

Please contact Hiro Mori [email protected] and Sandie Wankel [email protected] to schedule these services.