Comment on Wu and Spiegelman. Irisin ERKs the fat. Diabetes 2014;63:381-383.

Wu and Spiegelman (1) summarized recent findings on the signaling, the putative receptor, and the physiological implications of the new myokine irisin for both rodents and humans. Overall, they state that irisin may be of great interest as a human therapeutic due to the activation of a thermogenic gene program in adipocytes (1). Irisin is cleaved from FNDC5, a type 1 membrane protein that was originally reported to be upregulated in response to exercise in both mice and men (2 …