Research: Brown Fat Starts at the Aorta

KREMS, Austria - March 12, 2026 - PRLog -- A team of scientists has identified an unexpected embryonic "starting point" for several brown-fat depots: a small cell niche around the dorsal aorta. Brown adipose tissue helps mammals to regulate their body temperature, and it is drawing growing attention as obesity rises worldwide. Using a combination of time-controlled genetic lineage tracing and single-cell RNA sequencing in early mouse embryos, the researchers show that progenitor cells from this aorta-adjacent region later contribute to brown fat in multiple body locations – while the best-known depot between the shoulder blades (interscapular region) is only minimally derived from this source. The work was carried out primarily at several top research facilities in Berlin and parts of it are now brought to Karl Landsteiner University (KL Krems) through the senior scientist Prof. Sigmar Stricker.

Brown adipose tissue – often called 'brown fat' – is not uniform across the body: it appears in distinct anatomical depots, and these depots differ in cellular composition and gene activity. This matters because researchers often use one depot as a model for "brown fat" in general. If depots do not share the same developmental origin, they may also differ in how they are regulated – and in how reliably findings from one region translate to another. The new study tackles this uncertainty by mapping exactly which embryonic progenitor pools feed into which depots, and when those fate decisions are made.

Original publication: The dorsal aortic compartment is a developmental source of brown adipose tissue in mice. S. Heider, C. Fischer, A. K.  Secener, P. Vallecillo-García, G. Kotsaris, Z. G. Meisen V. Pawolski. C. Giesecke-Thiel, T. Conrad, T. J. Schulz, S. Sauer, S. Stricker. Nature Communications (2026) 17:286, doi:10.1038/s41467-025-68147-9. https://kris.kl.ac.at/en/publications/the-dorsal-aortic-compartment-is-a-developmental-source-of-brown-/

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