Energy Conservation Drives Adaptive Specialization Through Fine-tuned Organizations

Abstract

Energy conservation is at the basis of evolutionary optimization in living systems. Yet, how cells maintain function during metabolic stress while preserving adaptive capacity remains unclear. Here, we use a functional genomics approach to identify metabolic human accelerated regions (mHARs) genomic hubs (evolutionarily tuned regions) in adipose tissue that coordinate adaptive responses to nutrient deficit. During fasting, cooperative regulators PGC1A, YY1, and CTCF activate these hubs, promoting chromatin contacts that regulate lipid cycling genes such as Dgat1 and Atg4c. This activation maintains lipid and pH homeostasis while limiting oxidative stress, thereby preserving cellular plasticity. When disrupted, nutrient-stress adaptations are impaired leading to metabolic dysfunction and glucose intolerance. This is driven by NCOA7, an oxidative stress mediator that impairs lysosome function and transcriptional plasticity, triggering an inflammatory response. In cellular models, this mechanism blocks pH-mediated PGC1A droplet plasticity, further inhibiting mHAR-genomic hub activity and metabolic homeostasis. Human adipocytes show enhanced transcriptional activity of these genomic hubs compared to murine cells, with multi-enhancer mHAR regulation suppressing disease-associated variants linked to ANGPTL3 and PCSK9. Loss of this cooperative plasticity shifts cells to maladaptive responses, activating STAT1-driven disease gene expression. Our findings reveal that investigating the contextual activity of evolutionary adaptations can uncover functional hubs critical for stress resilience. This also shows that cells exploit nutrient fluctuations to drive tunable transcriptional organizations that lead to durable adaptations, identifying actionable targets for metabolic disease. One-Sentence SummaryEvolutionary tuned nuclear compartments convert nutrient stress into adaptive transcriptional organizations that preserve plasticity and suppress metabolic disease.