Fat body-specific reduction of CTPS alleviates HFD-induced obesity

High-fat diet (HFD)-induced obesity is a multi-factorial disease including genetic, physiological, behavioral, and environmental components. Drosophila has emerged as an effective metabolic disease model. Cytidine 5'-triphosphate synthase (CTPS) is a crucial enzyme for the de novo synthesis of CTP, governing the cellular level of CTP and phospholipid synthesis. CTPS has been found to form filaments known as cytoophidia, which are evolutionarily conserved in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Here, we show that CTPS functions in fat bodies to regulate body weight and starvation resistance in Drosophila. HFD-induced obesity enhances CTPS transcription and lengthens cytoophidia in larval adipocytes. CTPS depletion in the fat body prevented HFD-induced obesity, including body weight gain, adipocyte expansion, and lipid accumulation, by inhibiting the PI3K-Akt-SREBP axis. A dominant-negative form of CTPS also inhibits adipocyte expansion and down-regulates lipogenic genes. As a result, our findings not only establish a functional link between CTPS and lipid homeostasis but also highlight a potential role of CTPS manipulation in the treatment of HFD-induced obesity. Comparative gene expression profiling analysis of RNA-seq data for fat body in CTPS knockdown and wild type larvae