I really love this publication. First, it was a writing collaboration with my former and current graduate students and post-doc. I do not think I have ever had so much fun writing a manuscript as I have with this one. Second, I think it is a really interesting, and perhaps provocative, piece about the variation and flexibility of brown adipose tissue (BAT) metabolism.
The paper is part review, part hypothesis proposal. The review portion consists of outlining the various known metabolic pathways of BAT while also highlighting the unknown. In sum, there are several ways to activate BAT and even more ways for it to function metabolically. There appear to be fast routes to activating BAT and quickly generating metabolic heat, and there appear to be slow routes to more long term BAT activation and fueling.
The more provocative part of this paper is exploring the possibility and evidence for their being an anaerobic arm of BAT metabolism, fitting within the fast route mentioned above. To be clear, we do not know yet if this is true, but the evidence is intriguing. My hope is that this paper encourages others to explore this potential anaerobic route within human BAT, and perhaps through such research, we can get a better handle on the populational variation with see in BAT today.