Myocardial Adipose Triglyceride Lipase Overexpression Protects against Burn-Induced Cardiac Lipid Accumulation and Injury.

Maladaptive cardiac metabolism is a common trigger of cardiac lipid accumulation and cardiac injury under serious burn challenge. Adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL) is the key enzyme that catalyzes triglyceride hydrolysis; however, its alteration and impact on cardiac function following serious burn injury are still unknown. Here, we found that the cardiac fatty acid (FA) metabolism increased, accompanied by augmented FA accumulation and ATGL expression, after serious burn injury. We generated heterozygous ATGL knockout and heterozygous cardiac-specific ATGL overexpression thermal burn mice. The results demonstrated that partial loss of ATGL could not relieve burn-induced cardiac lipid accumulation and cardiac injury, possibly due to the suppression of cardiac FA metabolism plus insufficient compensatory glucose utilization. In contrast, cardiac-specific overexpression of ATGL alleviated cardiac lipid accumulation and cardiac injury following burn challenge by switching the substrate preference from FA towards increased glucose utilization. The underlying mechanism was possibly related to increased glucose transporter-1 expression and reduced cardiac lipid accumulation induced by ATGL overexpression. Our data first demonstrated that elevated cardiac ATGL expression after serious burn injury is an adaptive, albeit insufficient, response to compensate for the increase in energy consumption and that further overexpression of ATGL is beneficial for ameliorating cardiac injury, indicating its therapeutic potential.