Professorship for Endothelial Signaling & Metabolism

Research Focus

Endothelial cells (ECs) are the smallest functional unit of blood and lymphatic vessels. ECs regulate new vessel growth during health and disease. Blood ECs nurture perivascular tissues, while lymphatic ECs regulate fluid homeostasis and immune cell transport. With the development of single cell sequencing, ECs were recognized to be heterogenous within an organism, building organ-specific vasculatures. My research focusses on the metabolic peculiarities of blood and lymphatic ECs in different vascular beds. In particular, I am interested how ECs use their metabolism to communicate with neighboring organ-specific cells and how they thereby control organ function. It has been shown that ECs can influence organ function by secreting molecules, also known as (lymph) angiocrine signaling. The aim of my group is to characterize the organ-specific EC secretome influencing organ physiology and to delineate how disturbed (lymph) angiocrine signaling leads to disease.

Specific Areas of Interest

Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is an organ designed to produce heat through non-shivering thermogenesis. Once thought to be physiologically irrelevant in adult humans, long-term activation of BAT has been hypothesized to contribute to wide-ranging health benefits and to be a new target to fight obesity.

Though BAT is highly vascularized, only few reports study ECs in BAT and most of them focus on angiogenic processes. Within a consortium of experts of adipose tissue biology (“BATenergy”), funded by the German Research Foundation, we study how brown adipocytes (BAs) signal to blood ECs. We hypothesize that during BAT activation, when BAs require high levels of oxygen and nutrients, BAs instruct ECs via paracrine signaling to increase nutrient and oxygen delivery. On the other hand, my group’s additional interest is how BAT-ECs communicate with BAs via angiocrine signaling to influence thermogenic BAT function.