Endocrine Abstracts

Pressure to conserve the primary structures of regulatory peptides during the evolution of vertebrates has been distinctly non-uniform. It is proposed that the major factor determining the extent to which the amino acid sequence of a peptide is conserved is the need to maintain high affinity binding to one or more specific receptors. In the case of peptides such as neuropeptide Y and somatostatin, that bind to multiple receptor subtypes via different signal epitopes, the compl...

We reported the isolation and structural characterization of CPF-AM1 and other peptides from the skin secretion of Xenopus amieti. This study investigated the insulin-releasing activities of synthetic CPF-AM1 using clonal pancreatic cell line, BRIN-BD11 and Swiss TO mice with diet-induced insulin resistance.Acute insulin-release studies were performed in Krebs Ringer bicarbonate buffer supplemented with 5.6 mM or 16.7 mM glucose, purified synthetic pepti...

Recent acute in vivo studies have shown that structural modifications of dogfish glucagon improves peptide stability and these analogues can act as dual agonists at both glucagon and GLP-1 receptors. Here, we compared the effects of chronic (51 days) twice daily administration of [D-Ala2]dogfish glucagon (Pep-N) and [D-Ala2]dogfish glucagon-exendin-4(31–39) construct (Pep-C), exendin-4(1–39) or saline treat...

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...