Endocrine Abstracts

An intact pituitary-adrenal axis is essential for life, yet is entirely dependent on a system with no inbuilt redundancy. Central to its activity a single peptide hormone, ACTH, acts on a single G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) at the adrenal cortex. This ACTH receptor, otherwise known as the Melanocortin 2 receptor (MC2R) is the smallest of all GPCRs, consequently being highly hydrophobic and lacking a signal sequence – hence its resemblance to a “blob”. Multi...