Obesity and common weight gain share a genetic basis. Professor Philippe Froguel, from Imperial College in Great Britain, and his team from the laboratoire Génomique et physiologie moléculaire des maladies métaboliques (CNRS/ Université Lille 2 / Institut Pasteur de Lille), in collaboration with teams from Inserm and Danish, Swiss and German partners, have discovered a new obesity gene that plays an essential role in the maturation of several key hormones that control food intake. Mutations in this gene increase the risk of severe obesity and can lead to excessive weight. These results were published online in the journal Nature Genetics.

To learn more, please read the CNRS press release.