LA JOLLA, CA — Body weight and fertility have long known to be related to each other – women who are too thin, for example, can have trouble becoming pregnant. Now, a master switch has been found in the brain of mice that controls both, and researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies say it may work the same way in humans. Findings from the study, published ahead of print in the Aug. 31 online edition of Nature Medicine, suggest that variations in the gene that produces this master switch, known as TORC1, could contribute a genetic component to obesity and infertility, and might be regulated with a novel drug. ‘This gene is crucial to the daisy chain of signals that run between body fat and the brain,’ says Marc Montminy, Ph.D., a professor in the Clayton Foundation Laboratories for Peptide Biology, who led the study. ‘It likely plays a pivotal role in how much we, as humans, eat and whether we have offspring.’ It is just as important as leptin, the well-known star regulator of appetite, Montminy says, because leptin turns on TORC1, which in turn activates a number of genes known to help control […]