professor peter kovacs and his team at the i.f.b. at a part of the diseases center at leipsic university hospital research how our genes influence our weight. whether you get fat or stay thin depends on how much you eat how many calories you consume and how much you exercise or. maintaining a healthy weight also depends on your genes we want to find those genes and find out how they work the. genes provide the blueprint for our body and bodily processes so the aim is to establish which genes are involved in producing hormones and proteins that influence our eating habits and our metabolism . as part of the research the team examines fat cells from very obese people who stomachs have been made smaller through barry at trick surgery. we all have tens of thousands of genes genes consist of a double helix of base pairs. there are 4 bases. they're known for short as a c. and g. . a lot of our genes are the same in everybody. but sometimes variants emerge. it could be that even a tiny change has an impact on a person's weight. several gene