SPHER ES is a 6 years project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It gathers 3 principal investigators: Dominique Langin, Professor at University Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, Mikael Rydén, Professor of Clinical and Exprimental Fat Tissue Research at the Department of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet and Bruno Antonny, Research Director at CNRS.

The goal of SPHERES is to understand the dynamics and consequences of adipocyte hypertrophy (enlargement) through investigation of its large lipid droplet (LD). SPHERES PIs postulate that disturbances in the interactions between LD proteins and LD lipid composition lead to adipocyte hypertrophy and its deleterious consequences. Spanning from molecular, cellular to the whole-body level, SPHERES will link new knowledge on the formation and maintenance of large adipocyte LDs to the deleterious impact of adipocyte hypertrophy.