Inhibition of Insulin Release by Urotensin II - A Study on the Perfused Rat Pancreas

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Abstract
Urotensin-II (U-II) is a vasoactive cyclic dodecapeptide first isolated from the caudal neurosecretory system from the teleost [ 1 ], which has been recently cloned from a number of species including mouse, rat [ 2 ] and human [ 3 ]. In 1999, two groups described the identification of an orphan human G-protein-coupled receptor homologous to rat GPR14 which functions as U-II receptor [ 4 ] [ 5 ]. Sequence analysis of U-II peptides revealed that the C-terminal cyclic hexapeptide (-Cys-Phe-Trp-Lys-Tyr-Cys-) is well preserved across species [ 6 ], and is also structurally similar to a biologically active region of somatostatin-14 (-Phe-Trp-Lys-Thr-) [ 7 ]. In view of the structural analogy of U-II with somatostatin, we investigated its effect on pancreatic hormone secretion in this study, which was performed in the isolated perfused rat pancreas.

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