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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America logoLink to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
. 1987 Jun;84(12):4083–4087. doi: 10.1073/pnas.84.12.4083

Synthetic peptide antagonists of glucagon.

C G Unson, D Andreu, E M Gurzenda, R B Merrifield
PMCID: PMC305026  PMID: 3035568

Abstract

Several glucagon analogs were synthesized in an effort to find derivatives that would bind with high affinity to the glucagon receptor of rat liver membranes but would not activate membrane-bound adenylate cyclase and, therefore, would serve as antagonists of the hormone. Measurements on a series of glucagon/secretin hybrids indicated that replacement of Asp9 in glucagon by Glu9, found in secretin, was the important sequence difference in the N terminus of the two hormones. Further deletion of His1 and introduction of a C-terminal amide resulted in des-His1-[Glu9]glucagon amide, which had a 40% binding affinity relative to that of native glucagon but caused no detectable adenylate cyclase activation in the rat liver membrane. This antagonist completely inhibited the effect of a concentration of glucagon that alone gave a full agonist response. It had an inhibition index of 12. The pA2 was 7.2. An attempt was made to relate conformation with receptor binding. The peptides were synthesized by solid-phase methods and purified to homogeneity by reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography on C18-silica columns.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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