It is well known that the mu-opioid receptor (MOR) plays an important role in the rewarding properties of ethanol. However, it is less clear how chronic ethanol consumption affects MOR signaling. Here, we demonstrate that rats with prolonged voluntary ethanol consumption develop antinociceptive tolerance to opioids. Signaling through the MOR is controlled at many levels, including via the proce...

The C-terminal domain of the alpha subunit (alpha CTD) of Escherichia coli RNA polymerase is often involved in transcriptional regulation. The alpha CTD typically stimulates transcription via interactions with promoter UP element DNA and transcriptional activators. DNase I footprinting and gel mobility shift assays were used to look for potential interaction of the alpha CTD with the phage Mu m...

Opiates modulate many macrophage functions. Microglia, the resident macrophages of the brain, migrate to sites of inflammation within the CNS. Using primer sets designed to span the entire open reading frame of the human brain mu opioid receptor (MOR), we found that microglial cells constitutively expressed MOR mRNA. The cDNA sequences of the MOR open reading frame in microglia were identical t...

BACKGROUND N-methyl-1-deoxynojirimycin (MOR-14), an alpha-glucosidase inhibitor, reduces the glycogenolytic rate by inhibiting the alpha-1,6-glucosidase of glycogen-debranching enzyme in the liver, in addition to possessing an antihyperglycemic action by blocking alpha-1,4-glucosidase in the intestine. Because the reduction of the glycogenolytic rate may be one of the mechanisms of myocardial p...

The pharmacological effects of opioid drugs are mediated mainly by the mu-opioid receptor (MOR), which is encoded by an mRNA transcript named MOR1. Although several MOR mRNA splice variants have been reported, their biological relevance has been debated. In this study, we found that probes of regions essential for the production of functional MOR, as well as that of the 3'-downstream region of ...

The 5 -flanking region of the mouse opioid receptor (MOR) gene has two promoters, referred to as distal and proximal. MOR mRNA is predominantly initiated by the proximal promoter. Previously, several important cis-elements and transfactors have been shown to play a functional role in the proximal promoter of the MOR gene. In this study, we defined another functional, negative regulatory element...

Chronic morphine treatment produces behavioral and cellular opioid tolerance that has been proposed to be caused by attenuated μ-opioid receptor (MOR) recovery from desensitization (resensitization). The process of MOR resensitization is thought to require βarrestin-2 (βarr-2)-dependent trafficking of desensitized receptors to endosomal compartments, followed by recycling of resensitized recept...

Narcotic analgesics cause addiction by poorly understood mechanisms, involving mu opoid receptor (MOR). Previous cell culture studies have demonstrated significant basal, spontaneous MOR signaling activity, but its relevance to narcotic addiction remained unclear. In this study, we tested basal MOR-signaling activity in brain tissue from untreated and morphine-pretreated mice, in comparison to ...

The MOR cryptosystem is a generalization of the ElGamal cryptosystem, where the discrete logarithm problem works in the automorphism group of a group G, instead of the group G itself. The framework for the MOR cryptosystem was first proposed by Paeng et al. [13]. Mahalanobis [10] used the group of unitriangular matrices for the MOR cryptosystem. That effort was successful: the MOR cryptosystem ...

Delta (DOR) and mu opioid receptors (MOR) can complex as heteromers, conferring functional properties in agonist binding, signaling and trafficking that can differ markedly from their homomeric counterparts. Because of these differences, DOR/MOR heteromers may be a novel therapeutic target in the treatment of pain. However, there are currently no ligands selective for DOR/MOR heteromers, and, c...