1. Description of the constitutive activity of cloned human melatonin receptors hMT1 and hMT2 and discovery of inverse agonists
- Author
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Olivier Nosjean, Séverine Devavry, Benoît Malpaux, Gilberto Spadoni, Céline Legros, Philippe Delagrange, William Cohen, Chantal Brasseur, and Jean A. Boutin
- Subjects
0303 health sciences ,biology ,Chinese hamster ovary cell ,Heterologous ,Pharmacology ,biology.organism_classification ,3. Good health ,Cell biology ,Melatonin ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Endocrinology ,medicine ,Inverse agonist ,Cricetulus ,Signal transduction ,Receptor ,hormones, hormone substitutes, and hormone antagonists ,030217 neurology & neurosurgery ,Intracellular ,030304 developmental biology ,medicine.drug - Abstract
Melatonin receptors have been described to activate different G proteindependent signaling pathways, both in laboratory, heterologous, cellular models and in physiological conditions. Furthermore, the constitutive activity of G proteincoupled receptors has been shown to be key in physiological and pathological conditions. In the case of melatonin receptors, information is rather scare and concerns only MT1 receptors. In the present report, we show that the G proteincoupled melatonin receptors do have a constitutive, nonmelatonin-induced signaling activity using two cellular models of different origins, the Chinese hamster ovary cell line and Neuro2A, a neuroblastoma cell line. Furthermore, we show that this constitutive activity involves mainly Gi proteins, which is consistent with the common knowledge on the melatonin receptors. Importantly, we also describe, for the first time, inverse agonist properties for melatonin ligands. Although it is clear than more in-depth, biochemistry-based studies will be required to better understand by which pathway(s) the constitutively active melatonin receptors transfer melatonin information into intracellular biochemical events; our data open interesting perspectives for understanding the importance of the constitutive activity of melatonin receptors in physiological conditions.
- Published
- 2011