Endocrine Abstracts

Obesity and its major consequence, type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM), is epidemic throughout Western society. T2DM accounts for 95% of the diabetes worldwide. One limitation to the development of new diabetes treatments has been a lack of effective animal models to use in research. There are no rodent models that recapitulate the pancreatic β-cell lesions of humans with T2DM. Moreover, animal models of obesity either require overfeeding which is expensive and takes weeks t...

Leptin is a pleiotropic hormone acting both centrally and peripherally. It participates in variety of biological processes including energy metabolism, reproduction and modulation of the immune response. So far structural elements affecting leptin binding to its receptor remain unknown. We employed random mutagenesis of leptin, followed by selection of high-affinity mutants by yeast-surface display and discovered that replacing residue D23 with a non-negatively charged amino a...