tubby, A NEW OBESITY GENE In the april 19, 1996 issue of Cell, Kleyn et al report that mutation in the tubby gene is responsible for the tubby obesity phenotype in mice.The normal tub mRNA is abundantly expressed in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that controls the body weight. The tubby phenotype emerged as a result of a single base change that resulted in a mature tub mRNA that contained an intron. As a consequence, 44 amino acids in the carboxy terminal of the protein were subsituted with 24 intron-encoded amino acids. These findings incriminate the abnormal mRNA in the induction of the tubby obesity phenotype. REFERENCE: Patrick W. Kleyn,Wei Fan,Steve G. Kovats,John J. Lee,Jacqueline C. Pulido,Ye Wu,Lucy R. Berkemeier,Don J. Misumi,Lisa Holmgren,Olga Charlat,Elizabeth A. Woolf,Olga Tayber,Thomas Brody,Pei Shu,Fiona Hawkins,Brenda Kennedy,Linda Baldini, Chris Ebeling, Geoffrey D. Alperin,Jim Deeds,Nathan D. Lakey,Janice Culpepper,Hong Chen,M. Alexandra Glücksmann-Kuis,George A. Carlson, Geoffrey M. Duyk,and Karen J. Moore: Identification and Characterization of the Mouse Obesity Gene tubby: A Member of a Novel Gene Family. Cell, 1996