Endocrine Abstracts

The concentration of many neuropeptides in the brains of ectothermic vertebrates is several orders of magnitude higher than in the brains of mammals. We have taken advantage of this singular situation to isolate from the brain of the European green frog, Rana esculenta, a number of regulatory peptides that are orthologous to mammalian neuroendocrine peptides. These include α-MSH, γ-MSH, two tachykinins, two GnRH variants, CRH, PACAP, NPY, CGRP, CNP, GRP, and O...

The regulatory processes of appetite and metabolism have turned out to be exceedingly complex and involve numerous hormones and neurotransmitters, particularly peptides. Evolutionary studies in our laboratory have shown that many genes encoding peptides and receptors were duplicated in the early stages of vertebrate evolution through chromosome duplications. Thus, many of the components have existed for 400–500 million years, for instance the various members of the famili...

Genome sequence projects in combination with advances in mass spectrometry and bioinformatics have created several new possibilities for comparative endocrinology. In 2001 we introduced the peptidomics technology that allows the identification of the complement of native (neuro)peptides in cells, tissues, organs and organisms. Especially when genome sequence information is available (D. melanogaster, A. mellifera, C. elegans…), neuropeptidomes were successfully id...

omatostatin, originally isolated from ovine hypothalami in 1973, and cortistatin, identified a decade ago in amphibians and then in human and rodents, are two highly related peptides thought to derive from a common ancestor gene. Owing to their high structural homology, both peptides bind with similar affinity to the five so-called somatostatin receptors (sst1-sst5), and exert virtually undistinguishable effects on several physiological targets, including inhibition of endocri...