Prolonged deprivation of food induces dramatic changes in mammalian metabolism, including the release of large amounts of fatty acids from the adipose tissue, followed by their oxidation in the liver. The nuclear receptor known as peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor α (PPARα) was found to play a role in regulating mitochondrial and peroxisomal fatty acid oxidation, suggesting that PPARα may be involved in the transcriptional response to fasting. To investigate this possibility, PPARα-null mice were subjected to a high fat diet or to fasting, and their responses were compared with those of wildtype mice. PPARα-null mice chronically fed a high fat diet showed a massive accumulation of lipid in their livers. A similar phenotype was noted in PPARα-null mice fasted for 24 hours, who also displayed severe hypoglycemia, hypoketonemia, hypothermia, and elevated plasma free fatty acid levels, indicating a dramatic inhibition of fatty acid uptake and oxidation. It is shown that to accommodate the increased requirement for hepatic fatty acid oxidation, PPARα mRNA is induced during fasting in wildtype mice. The data indicate that PPARα plays a pivotal role in the management of energy stores during fasting. By modulating gene expression, PPARα stimulates hepatic fatty acid oxidation to supply substrates that can be metabolized by other tissues.
J. Clin. Invest. 103:1489-1498 (1999).adipose tissue (BAT) and the liver, and to a lesser extent in the kidneys, skeletal muscle, and heart (10). Of the 3 isotypes, PPARα has been the best characterized, a fortunate consequence of the availability of PPARα-null mice (16). Studies with these mice have demonstrated that PPARα controls the expression of numerous genes related to lipid metabolism in the liver, including genes involved in mitochondrial β-oxidation, peroxisomal β-oxidation, fatty acid uptake and/or binding, and lipoprotein assembly and transport (17)(18)(19). Several functional consequences of lowered gene expression levels were observed: PPARα-null mice are refractory to peroxisome proliferators, and male mice appeared to be overly sensitive to etomoxir, an inhibitor of carnitine palmitoyltransferase I (CPTI) (16,20). A striking metabolic defect was observed in aged (8-month-old) PPARα-null mice, characterized by a sexually dimorphic dyslipidemia with pronounced adiposity in females and steatosis in males (21). Despite this great expansion of our understanding of the function of PPARα, what remains unclear is when and how, in an intact organism, the PPARα signaling pathways are triggered, and how this specifically affects lipid and carbohydrate metabolism.One physiological condition during which PPARα-dependent signaling should become challenged is fasting, because (a) huge amounts of fatty acids are delivered to the liver to be oxidized; (b) once taken up, fatty acids have to be delivered to the mitochondria for oxidation; and (c) β-oxidation is accelerated in conjunction with increased synthesis of ketone bodies.A second physiological stimulus that may challenge t...