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Liver cells and western diet - regulating inflammation

A high fat Western-style diet leads to hepatic steatosis that can progress to liver cancer. Christoph Thiele (LIMES Institute) from the Cluster of Excellence ImmunoSensation and his colleagues used click chemistry-based metabolic tracing and microscopy, to study the interaction between Kupffer cells and hepatocytes ex vivo. The mechanism that leads to the development of steatosis upon nutritional overload is complex and only partially understood. Their study was recently published in the Journal of Cells and could show that inflammatory signals from liver cells upon western diet can lead to steatosis. The publication was shown on the cover of the journals edition in October.

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Kupffer Cells Sense Free Fatty Acids and Regulate Hepatic Lipid Metabolism in High-Fat Diet and Inflammation. Diehl et al., Cells (2020) 9(10), 2258, https://doi.org/10.3390/cells9102258

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