Cecilia Leal Seminar
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cecilia Leal, will deliver a department seminar titled, “Calorie-dense diets induce the solidification of lipid droplet organelles,” Tuesday, September 23rd at 1:25 p.m. in room B75 Amundson Hall.
Abstract
Adipose-derived lipid droplets (LDs) are rich in triacylglycerols (TAGs), which regulate essential cellular processes such as energy storage. Although TAG accumulation and LD expansion in adipocytes occur during obesity, how LDs dynamically package TAGs in response to excessive nutrients remains elusive. We will present our recent findings that LD lipidomes display a remarkable increase in TAG acyl chain saturation under calorie-dense diets, turning them conducive to close-packing. Using traditional materials’ characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction, solid-state NMR, and high-resolution imaging, we show that beyond size, LDs derived from mice under obesogenic diets govern fat accumulation by packing TAGs in different crystalline polymorphs. Consistently, LDs and tissue stiffen for high-calorie-fed mice with more than a two-fold increase in elastic moduli compared to normal diet. Our data suggest that LDs undergo structural remodeling, close–packing rigid and highly saturated TAGs in response to caloric overload, allowing for optimal expansion of fat during the initial stages of obesity.
Cecilia Leal Biography
Cecilia Leal is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Bioengineering, and Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) since 2012. Her lab investigates soft and bioinspired materials, lipids, membranes, and lipid nanoparticles for drug and gene delivery, for which she has received numerous awards such as the NIH Director’s New Innovator and NSF CAREER Awards (2016), the University Scholar award (2023), the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research for Associate (2021) and Assistant (2018) professor, and the Provost Distinguished Promotion Awards (2024 and 2019). Cecilia is often in the list of excellent teachers ranked by her students and received the College Award for Sustained Excellence in Community Engagement.
