Embryogenesis is a critical process for which nutritional and metabolic signals act as informational cues that shape adipose tissue development and establish long-lasting metabolic health. Emerging evidence indicates that adipose tissue is not a passive energy storage but a developmentally and metabolically dynamic organ. Cellular composition, functional capacity, and plasticity of adipose are programmed early through coordinated transcriptional, epigenetics, and proteomics processes. Maternal environments in nutritional challenge, including overnutrition and malnutrition, influence adipocyte lineage commitment, depot-specific expansion, and metabolic functionality, predisposing offspring to divergent risks of obesity and metabolic disease. The future of perinatal adipose biology and genomics relies on integrating multi-omics approaches with an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytical perspective to resolve complex developmental processes and predict long-lasting metabolic health. Furthermore, the incorporation of sex-specific models is important, which will be essential for capturing biological heterogeneity and ensuring translational relevance. Together, these advance perspectives are predisposed to shift the field from descriptive associations toward predictive and preventive paradigms, reinterpreting metabolic disease risk as a modifiable consequence of early-life adipose programming rather than an inevitable outcome of later-life exposures.
Chae et al. (Fri,) studied this question.