Agouti is a paracrine-acting, transient antagonist of melanocortin 1 receptors that specifies the subapical band of yellow on otherwise black hairs of the wild-type coat. To better understand both agouti structure/function and the germline damage caused by chemicals and radiation, an allelic series of 25 recessive, homozygous-viable agouti mutations generated in specific-locus tests were charac...

For decades, geneticists, as well as breeders of “fancy” pets, have been interested in the interaction of the melanocortin 1 receptor locus (Mc1r; also known as melanocyte-stimulating hormone receptor, Mshr) with the Agouti locus because of the array of coat colors that alterations at these loci generate. In the simplest case, a mouse with two wild-type Mc1r alleles and two recessive Agouti all...

BackgroundSodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT-2) inhibitors are currently used to treat patients with diabetes. Previous studies have demonstrated that treatment SGLT-2 is accompanied by altered metabolic phenotypes. However, it has not been investigated whether the hypothalamic circuit participates in development of compensatory phenotypes triggered inhibitors. MethodsMice were fed a standard...

Objective: Polymorphic variations in humans are supposed to be responsible for inter individual differences in susceptibility to multifactorial disorders like obesity. Genetic variants of the melanocortin-4 receptor gene (MC4R), agouti related protein (AGRP) and prboopiomelanocortin (POMC) are reported to be associated with obesity. Therefore we tried to see the association of these genes with ...

Agouti signaling protein (ASIP), the human (h) homolog of agouti, is an endogenous melanocortin peptide antagonist. To date, characterization of this protein has been performed with recombinant protein only and without the availability of an ASIP/agouti radioligand. In this report we describe the functional characteristics of a chemically synthesized truncated ASIP variant, ASIP-[90-132 (L89Y)]...