Fifty years on: How we uncovered the unique bioenergetics of brown adipose tissue

Abstract

Exactly 50 years ago, I was a post-doc in the laboratory of Olov Lindberg in Stockholm measuring fatty acid oxidation by mitochondria isolated from thermogenic brown adipose tissue, when we noticed a curious nonlinearity in the respiration rate. This initiated a convoluted chain of experiments revealing that the mitochondria were textbook demonstrations of the then novel and highly controversial “chemiosmotic hypothesis” of Peter Mitchell and that thermogenesis was regulated by a proton short-circuit, mediated by a 32 kDa “uncoupling protein,” UCP1, activated by fatty acid. This review is a personal account of the research into the bioenergetics of isolated brown adipocytes and isolated mitochondria, which led, after fifteen years of investigation, to what is still accepted as the “canonical” UCP1-mediated mechanism of nonshivering thermogenesis, uniting whole animal physiology with mitochondrial bioenergetics.