Recent research has identified endogenous cationic antimicrobial peptides as important factors in the innate immunity of many organisms, including fish. It is known that antimicrobial activity, as well as lysozyme activity, can be induced in coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) mucus after exposure of the fish to infectious agents. Since lysozyme alone does not have antimicrobial activity against...

Observations on humans and experimental animals with localized hypothalamic lesions led to the earliest notions about the role of the lateral hypothalamus (LH). From studying patients with encephalitis lethargica, von Economo [1] proposed that the posterior hypothalamus (including the LH) was required for maintaining the awake state. The signaling molecules and circuitry responsible for this ob...

The development of the prototype synthetic delta-opioid receptor antagonist peptides TIPP [(H-Tyr-Tic-Phe- Phe-OH); Tic: tetrahydroisoquinoline-3-carboxylic acid] and TIPPpsi (H-Tyr-psiTic-Phe-Phe-OH) by Schiller and coworkers was followed by extensive structure-activity relationship studies, leading to the emergence of numerous analogs that are of pharmacological interest. Eight novel diastere...

Posttranslational processing of preprosecretin generates several COOH-terminally extended forms of secretin and α-carboxyl amidated secretin. We used synthetic canine secretin analogs with COOH-terminal -amide, -Gly, or -Gly-Lys-Arg to examine the effects of COOH-terminal extensions of secretin on bioactivity and detection in RIA. Synthetic products were purified by reverse-phase and ion-exchan...

The kinetics and thermodynamics of binding of transportan 10 (tp10) and four of its variants to phospholipid vesicles, and the kinetics of peptide-induced dye efflux, were compared. Tp10 is a 21-residue, amphipathic, cationic, cell-penetrating peptide similar to helical antimicrobial peptides. The tp10 variants examined include amidated and free peptides, and replacements of tyrosine by tryptop...

As is the case with many other peptide hormones of the brain and gut, gastrin requires a carboxyl-terminal amide moiety for optimal biological activity. In the structure of progastrin, the carboxyl-terminal Phe of gastrin is followed by the sequence Gly93-Arg94-Arg95, which must be processed sequentially by an endoprotease, a carboxypeptidase, and an amidating enzyme to produce amidated bioacti...

The neuropeptide BW receptor 1 (NPBW1, provisional nomenclature [6]) is activated by two 23-amino-acid peptides, W (neuropeptide W-23) and B B-23) [22, 7]. C-terminally extended forms of the peptides W-30 B-29) also activate NPBW1 [2]. Unique to both N-terminal bromination first tryptophan residue, it from this post-translational modification that NPB derived. These were identified bovine hypot...

It is well known that the amidated C-terminal part of gastrin is crucial for its interaction with the classical seven transmembrane domain receptors CCK-1 or CCK-2. Nevertheless, over the past 10 years, several groups have characterized new binding sites using peptides related to gastrin (particularly glycine-extended forms of gastrin) on various tumoral and nontumoral cell lines. In the presen...

BACKGROUND Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) is a vasoactive neuropeptide whose biological activity has potential therapeutic value for many vascular related diseases. CGRP is a 37 amino acid neuropeptide that signals through a G protein-coupled receptor belonging to the secretin receptor family. Previous studies on the calcitonin-like receptor (CLR), which requires co-expression of the re...