Why being obese doesn’t hurt polar bears
Posted by staff / May 14, 2014 BerkeleyEline Lorenzenpolar bearsUniversity of California
“For polar bears, profound obesity is a benign state,” says Eline Lorenzen, a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley. “We wanted to understand how they are able to cope with that.”
“Polar bears have adapted genetically to a high fat diet that many people now impose on themselves,” says Rasmus Nielsen, of UC Berkeley’s Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics. “If we learn a bit about the genes that allows them to deal with that, perhaps that will give us tools to modulate human physiology down the line.”
Full story at Futurity.
Photo credit: US Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters/Flickr
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