Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Helmholtz Munich, among others, have developed a user-friendly portal with comprehensive data on human adipose tissue. The portal offers researchers and clinicians an opportunity to explore the biology of adipose tissue, right down to the individual cell level, without any requirement for knowledge in bioinformatics. The study is published in the journal Cell Metabolism.
For years, research on adipose tissue has generated large amounts of biomolecular data, but these datasets have been scattered across different repositories, making comprehensive analyses challenging.
Now, researchers have launched a knowledge portal called Adiposetissue.org that links molecular and clinical data from more than 6 000 individuals, allowing researchers and clinicians to explore obesity-related changes, weight-loss effects and cellular mechanisms in detail.
"We developed this knowledge portal to make adipose tissue data accessible to everyone, even those without expertise in bioinformatics," says Lucas Massier , a researcher at the Helmholtz Munich institute at the University of Leipzig in Germany and an affiliated researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.
Includes several analysis tools
The platform brings together data from 67 studies and is designed for both experienced bioinformaticians and researchers without advanced computing skills. It includes a range of advanced analysis tools and customisable modules for gene exploration, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, and perturbation studies.
"By breaking down barriers to data accessibility and enabling large-scale analysis, Adiposetissue.org is a powerful resource for researchers studying adipose biology and metabolic diseases," says Mikael Rydén , senior physician and professor at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge , Karolinska Institutet, who led the study together with Lucas Massier and senior researcher Niklas Mejhert at Karolinska Institutet and Steno Diabetes Center in Copenhagen.
The portal will be expanded
The work has been a major collaborative effort and the researchers will continue to expand the portal with new results. Future updates will include data on brown adipose tissue, additional clinical cohorts and interspecies comparisons.
A key part of the effort was led by Jiawei Zhong , PhD student, and Danae Zareifi , postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet. They ensured that data from different sources could be compared by standardising terminology. Given that little proteomic data was available, they also generated new protein profiling datasets, improving the portal's ability to verify gene activity findings.
The study has several funders, see the scientific article for a complete list. There are no reported conflicts of interest.
This news article is based on a press release from Helmholtz München.
Publication
"Adiposetissue.org: a Knowledge Portal Integrating Clinical and Experimental Data from Human Adipose Tissue" , Jiawei Zhong, Danae Zareifi, Sophie Weinbrenner, Mattias Hansen, Felix Klingelhuber, Pamela A. Nono Nankam, Scott Frendo-Cumbo, Nayanika Bhalla, Lina Cordeddu, Thais de Castro Barbosa, Peter Arner, Ingrid Dahlman, Maheswary Muniandy, Sini Heinonen, Kirsi H. Pietiläinen, Anne Hofmann, Adhideb Ghosh, Dorit John, Anke Tönjes, Patrik L. Ståhl, Yvonne Böttcher, Maria Keller, Peter Kovacs, Alastair G. Kerr, Dominique Langin, Christian Wolfrum, Matthias Bluher, Natalie Krahmer, Lucas Massier, Niklas Mejhert, Mikael Rydén, Cell Metabolism, online 20 February 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2025.01.012.
