Endocrine Abstracts

Hormones and hormone receptors in mammals, including humans, display bewildering complexity. The evolution of peptide hormone families with multiple members has been difficult to resolve because of their short sequences. Their G-protein-coupled receptor families are challenging because they display variable sequence rates along the proteins, between species, and over time. My laboratory has therefore combined analyses of sequences with investigation of conserved synteny, i.e. ...

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...

Neuroactive steroids synthesized in the brain, referred to as neurosteroids, have gained particular attention as they appear to be involved in the modulation of various neuroendocrine, behavioral and pathophysiological processes. Thus, the distribution of steroidogenic enzymes and the identification of the biochemical pathways leading to neurosteroid formation have now been almost completely elucidated in various groups of vertebrates. In contrast however, the neuronal mechani...