Structural and Molecular Evolutionary Analysis of Agouti and Agouti-Related Proteins

Structural and molecular evolutionary analysis of Agouti and Agouti-related proteins.

Agouti (ASIP) and Agouti-related protein (AgRP) are endogenous antagonists of melanocortin receptors that play critical roles in the regulation of pigmentation and energy balance, respectively, and which arose from a common ancestral gene early in vertebrate evolution. The N-terminal domain of ASIP facilitates antagonism by binding to an accessory receptor, but here we show that the N-terminal ...

Reply to Braasch and Postlethwait: Evolutionary origin of the teleost A2 agouti genes (agouti signaling protein 2 and agouti-related protein 2) remains unclear.

Identification of Distant Agouti-Like Sequences and Re-Evaluation of the Evolutionary History of the Agouti-Related Peptide (AgRP)

The Agouti-like peptides including AgRP, ASIP and the teleost-specific A2 (ASIP2 and AgRP2) peptides have potent and diverse functional roles in feeding, pigmentation and background adaptation mechanisms. There are contradictory theories about the evolution of the Agouti-like peptide family as well the nomenclature. Here we performed comprehensive mining and annotation of vertebrate Agouti-like...

Characterization of the dog Agouti gene and a nonagouti Agouti gene and a nonagouti

The interaction between two genes, Agouti and Melanocortin-1 receptor (Mc1r), produces diverse pigment patterns in mammals by regulating the type, amount, and distribution pattern of the two pigment types found in mammalian hair: eumelanin (brown/black) and pheomelanin (yellow/red). In domestic dogs (Canis familiaris), there is a tremendous variation in coat color patterns between and within br...

Molecular Mechanisms for Activation of the Agouti-Related Protein and Stimulation of Appetite

OBJECTIVE The agouti-related protein (Agrp) is a powerful orexigenic peptide, but little is known about its transcriptional regulation. The objective of this study was to determine molecular mechanisms for the activation of hypothalamic Agrp and identify compounds that stimulate appetite. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We used promoter analyses methods, hypothalamic cell culture and transfection...