Elsevier

Life Sciences

Volume 65, Issue 25, 12 November 1999, Pages 2727-2733
Life Sciences

Comparison of behavioural effects of NocII or NocIII, two related pronociceptin-derived peptides

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3205(99)00541-XGet rights and content

Abstract

Prepronociceptin contains, in addition to nociceptin, other potentially excisable peptides which may have physiological significance. We have here considered NocII, a heptadecapeptide whose sequence lies immediately downstream of that of nociceptin in the precursor polypeptide, as well as NocIII which corresponds to NocII extended by a stretch of three arginine residues. When i.c.v.-administered in mice, NocII (10 – 10,000 ng) stimulated horizontal locomotor activity and decreased the latency to paw licking but neither to rearing nor escape jumping in the hot plate test (55 °C). When nociceptin (100 ng) and NocII (100 ng) were simultaneously intracerebroventricularly injected, each peptide produced its own effect without modifying the effect of the other. NocII was ineffective in the tail flick and writhing tests. NocIII (NocII-Arg-Arg-Arg) was inactive in all tests, even when assayed as long as 40 min following i.c.v. administration. The fact that NocII, but not its very close structural analogue NocIII, is biologically active indicates that their may exist a specific receptor to NocII.

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    Interestingly, although there are some sequence similarities between PDYN and PNOC (Houtani et al., 1996), the peptides derived from PNOC have minimal affinity for the other opioid receptors (Fig. 1; Zhang et al., 1997). The propeptide is processed to form 3 primary signaling peptides (Fig. 2): nociceptin/orphanin-FQ, nocistatin (Okuda-Ashitaka et al., 1998), whose target receptor(s) is unclear (Avenali et al., 2016; Kuspiel et al., 2021; Osmakov et al., 2019), and NocII/NocIII that produce behavioral effects when administered intracerebroventricularly (Florin et al., 1997, 1999) but whose effector(s) remains unknown. Although in vivo experiments reported that nociceptin and nocistatin might work in opposition (Okuda-Ashitaka et al., 1998), in whole cell electrophysiology in locus coeruleus (LC) neurons nocistatin application did not activate a conductance and it also did not block responses to nociceptin (Connor et al., 1999).

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