An automated, direct method for measuring adipocyte cell size

Abstract

Current methods for direct determination of fat cell size are optical and non-automated. They are thus tedious, but have the advantage of providing estimates of the variance of a cell size distribution, as well as a measure of the mean cell size. An indirect method based on counting the number of osmium-fixed fat cells derived from a known wet weight of adipose tissue is also available. This method is automated and thus rapid, but does not provide information about the variance of the cell size distribution. In the present paper we describe a direct, automated method of fat cell sizing that provides estimates for both mean cell size and the variance of the cell size distribution. The correlation between our method and in indirect method based on counting osmium-fixed cells was 0.96. Transformation of the volume distribution to diameters indicated that cell diameters appeared to be normally distributed, confirming the observations of others.