AI Article Synopsis

  • The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) is crucial for regulating heart and blood vessel functions, involving key components like ACE and the AT1 and AT2 receptors.
  • While ACE and AT1 are targets for hypertension treatments, the AT2 receptor's role remains less understood and underutilized.
  • Researchers discovered a new toxin called A-CTX-cMila from Brazilian viper venom, showing strong selectivity for the AT1 receptor and blocking various cellular pathways, marking it as the first animal toxin known to impact angiotensin II receptors.

Article Abstract

The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) is one of the main regulatory systems of cardiovascular homeostasis. It is mainly composed of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) and angiotensin II receptors AT1 and AT2. ACE and AT1 are targets of choice for the treatment of hypertension, whereas the AT2 receptor is still not exploited due to the lack of knowledge of its physiological properties. Peptide toxins from venoms display multiple biological functions associated with varied chemical and structural properties. If Brazilian viper toxins have been described to inhibit ACE, no animal toxin is known to act on AT1/AT2 receptors. We screened a library of toxins on angiotensin II receptors with a radioligand competition binding assay. Functional characterization of the selected toxin was conducted by measuring second messenger production, G-protein activation and β-arrestin 2 recruitment using bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) based biosensors. We identified one original toxin, A-CTX-cMila, which is a 7-residues cyclic peptide from with no homology sequence with known angiotensin peptides nor identified toxins, displaying a 100-fold selectivity for AT1 over AT2. This toxin shows a competitive antagonism mode of action on AT1, blocking Gαq, Gαi3, GαoA, β-arrestin 2 pathways and ERK activation. These results describe the first animal toxin active on angiotensin II receptors.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9916866PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijms24032330DOI Listing

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