The GO annotation dataset provided by the UniProt Consortium (GOA: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA) is a comprehensive set of evidenced-based associations between terms from the Gene Ontology resource and UniProtKB proteins. Currently supplying over 100 million annotations to 11 million proteins in more than 360 000 taxa, this resource has increased 2-fold over the last 2 years and has benefited from a wealth of checks to improve annotation correctness and consistency as well as now supplying a greater information content enabled by GO Consortium annotation format developments. Detailed, manual GO annotations obtained from the curation of peer-reviewed papers are directly contributed by all UniProt curators and supplemented with manual and electronic annotations from 36 model organism and domain-focused scientific resources. The inclusion of high-quality, automatic annotation predictions ensures the UniProt GO annotation dataset supplies functional information to a wide range of proteins, including those from poorly characterized, non-model organism species. UniProt GO annotations are freely available in a range of formats accessible by both file downloads and web-based views. In addition, the introduction of a new, normalized file format in 2010 has made for easier handling of the complete UniProt-GOA data set.
Leptin is thought to exert its actions on energy homeostasis through the long form of the leptin receptor (OB-Rb), which is present in the hypothalamus and in certain peripheral organs, including adipose tissue. In this study, we examined whether leptin has direct effects on the function of brown and white adipose tissue (BAT and WAT, respectively) at the metabolic and molecular levels. The chronic peripheral intravenous administration of leptin in vivo for 4 d resulted in a 1.6-fold increase in the in vivo glucose utilization index of BAT, whereas no significant change was found after intracerebroventricular administration compared with pair-fed control rats, compatible with a direct effect of leptin on BAT. The effect of leptin on WAT fat pads from lean Zucker Fa/ fa rats was assessed ex vivo, where a 9-and 16-fold increase in the rate of lipolysis was observed after 2 h of exposure to 0.1 and 10 nM leptin, respectively. In contrast, no increase in lipolysis was observed in the fat pads from obese fa/fa rats, which harbor an inactivating mutation in the OB-Rb. At the level of gene expression, leptin treatment for 24 h increased malic enzyme and lipoprotein lipase RNA 1.8 Ϯ 0.17 and 1.9 Ϯ 0.14-fold, respectively, while aP2 mRNA levels were unaltered in primary cultures of brown adipocytes from lean Fa/fa rats. Importantly, however, no significant effect of leptin was observed on these genes in brown adipocytes from obese fa/fa animals. The presence of OB-Rb receptors in adipose tissue was substantiated by the detection of its transcripts by RT-PCR, and leptin treatment in vivo and in vitro activated the specific STATs implicated in the signaling pathway of the OB-Rb.Taken together, our data strongly suggest that leptin has direct effects on BAT and WAT, resulting in the activation of the Jak/STAT pathway and the increased expression of certain target genes, which may partially account for the observed increase in glucose utilization and lipolysis in leptintreated adipose tissue. ( J. Clin. Invest. 1997. 100:2858-2864.)
It has been claimed that factors favoring the development or maintenance of animal or human obesity may include increases in glucocorticoid production or hyperresponsiveness of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. In normal rats, glucocorticoids have been shown to be necessary for chronic intracerebroventricular infusion of neuropeptide Y to produce obesity and related abnormalities. Conversely, glucocorticoids inhibited the body weight-lowering effect of leptin. Such dual action of glucocorticoids may occur within the central nervous system, since both neuropeptide Y and leptin act within the hypothalamus. The aim of this study was to determine the effects of glucocorticoids (dexamethasone) given intracerebroventricularly to normal rats on body weight homeostasis and hypothalamic levels of neuropeptide Y and corticotropin-releasing hormone. Continuous central glucocorticoid infusion for 3 days resulted in marked sustained increases in food intake and body weight relative to saline-infused controls. The infusion abolished endogenous corticosterone output and produced hyperinsulinemia, hypertriglyceridemia, and hyperleptinemia, three salient abnormalities of obesity syndromes. Central glucocorticoid infusion also produced a marked decrease in the expression of uncoupling protein (UCP)-1 and UCP-3 in brown adipose tissue and UCP-3 in muscle. Finally, chronic central glucocorticoid administration increased the hypothalamic levels of neuropeptide Y and decreased those of corticotropin-releasing hormone. When the same dose of glucocorticoids was administered peripherally, it resulted in decreases in food intake and body weight, in keeping with the decrease in hypothalamic neuropeptide Y levels. These results suggest that glucocorticoids induce an obesity syndrome in rodents by acting centrally and not peripherally.
neXtProt (http://www.nextprot.org/) is a new human protein-centric knowledge platform. Developed at the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), it aims to help researchers answer questions relevant to human proteins. To achieve this goal, neXtProt is built on a corpus containing both curated knowledge originating from the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot knowledgebase and carefully selected and filtered high-throughput data pertinent to human proteins. This article presents an overview of the database and the data integration process. We also lay out the key future directions of neXtProt that we consider the necessary steps to make neXtProt the one-stop-shop for all research projects focusing on human proteins.
The neXtProt human protein knowledgebase (https://www.nextprot.org) continues to add new content and tools, with a focus on proteomics and genetic variation data. neXtProt now has proteomics data for over 85% of the human proteins, as well as new tools tailored to the proteomics community.Moreover, the neXtProt release 2016-08-25 includes over 8000 phenotypic observations for over 4000 variations in a number of genes involved in hereditary cancers and channelopathies. These changes are presented in the current neXtProt update. All of the neXtProt data are available via our user interface and FTP site. We also provide an API access and a SPARQL endpoint for more technical applications.
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