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TFEB controls cellular lipid metabolism through a starvation-induced autoregulatory loop

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 01 August 2013

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Abstract

The lysosomal–autophagic pathway is activated by starvation and plays an important role in both cellular clearance and lipid catabolism. However, the transcriptional regulation of this pathway in response to metabolic cues is uncharacterized. Here we show that the transcription factor EB (TFEB), a master regulator of lysosomal biogenesis and autophagy, is induced by starvation through an autoregulatory feedback loop and exerts a global transcriptional control on lipid catabolism via Ppargc1α and Ppar1α. Thus, during starvation a transcriptional mechanism links the autophagic pathway to cellular energy metabolism. The conservation of this mechanism in Caenorhabditis elegans suggests a fundamental role for TFEB in the evolution of the adaptive response to food deprivation. Viral delivery of TFEB to the liver prevented weight gain and metabolic syndrome in both diet-induced and genetic mouse models of obesity, suggesting a new therapeutic strategy for disorders of lipid metabolism.

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Figure 1: Autoregulation of TFEB during starvation.
Figure 2: The TFEB lipid metabolism network.
Figure 3: TFEB directly regulates Pgc-1α expression during starvation.
Figure 4: Liver fat catabolism in response to starvation is regulated by TFEB.
Figure 5: TFEB regulates lipid catabolism through the autophagic pathway.
Figure 6: Metabolic profile of HDAd-TFEB-overexpressing mice.
Figure 7: TFEB prevents diet-induced obesity and metabolic syndrome.
Figure 8: Conservation of TFEB-mediated autoregulation and of starvation response in C. elegans.

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Change history

  • 25 June 2013

    In the version of this Article originally published, in the Methods section, Supplementary Table S8 was incorrectly cited as listing lipid metabolism gene-specific primers under the heading 'RNA extraction, quantitative PCR and statistical analysis'. The list of gene-specific primers has now been uploaded as Supplementary Table S10 and the citation in the Methods has been amended. This has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of this Article.

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Acknowledgements

We thank G. Karsenty, D. Moore, H. Zoghbi, S. Colamarino, E. Abrams, D. Sabatini and R. Zoncu for critical reading of the manuscript. We thank G. Diez-Roux for critical reading of the manuscript, helpful discussions and support in manuscript preparation. We are also grateful to D. Medina, C. Spampanato and F. Annunziata for their contribution. We thank A. Soukas for help with the oil red O staining of C. elegans. We acknowledge the support of the Italian Telethon Foundation grant numbers TGM11CB6 (C.S., R.D.C. and A.B) and TGM11SB1 (A.C. and D.D.B.); the Beyond Batten Disease Foundation (C.S., F.V., T.H. and A.B.); European Research Council Advanced Investigator grant no. 250154 (A.B.); March of Dimes #6-FY11-306 (A.B.); US National Institutes of Health (R01-NS078072) (A.B.). This work was supported in part by grants from the US National Institutes of Health (R01-HL51586) to L.C. and the Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center (P30-DK079638, L.C.) and the Mouse Metabolism Core (P.K.S.) at Baylor College of Medicine. T.J.K. is in part supported by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RP110390). O.V. was funded by a Fund for Medical Discovery postdoctoral fellowship from the Massachusetts General Hospital. This study was funded in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number R01GM101056-01 to J.E.I. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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C.S., G.M., P.K.S., F.V., O.V., T.H., R.D.C., A.C., D.P., T.J.K. and A.C.W. performed the experiments. D.D.B. supervised bioinformatic analyses. J.E.I. supervised the C. elegans experiments, L.C. supervised the metabolic studies, and A.B. and C.S. designed the overall study and supervised the work. All authors discussed the results and made substantial contributions to the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Carmine Settembre or Andrea Ballabio.

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Settembre, C., De Cegli, R., Mansueto, G. et al. TFEB controls cellular lipid metabolism through a starvation-induced autoregulatory loop. Nat Cell Biol 15, 647–658 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb2718

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