Pharmacology and biology of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) receptors

• Published in: Receptors & channels Vol. 8; no. 3-4; pp. 163 - 177
• Main Authors: Eckart, K, Jahn, O, Radulovic, J, Radulovic, M, Blank, T, Stiedl, O, Brauns, O, Tezval, H, Zeyda, T, Spiess, J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England 01.01.2002
• Subjects: Amino Acid Sequence; Animals; Apoptosis - physiology; Behavior - physiology; Binding Sites; Carrier Proteins - metabolism; Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone - antagonists & inhibitors; GTP-Binding Proteins - metabolism; Humans; Ligands; Molecular Sequence Data; Neurons - metabolism; Receptors, Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone - genetics; Receptors, Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone - metabolism; Sequence Alignment; Signal Transduction
• ISSN: 1060-6823; 1607-856X
• DOI: 10.1080/10606820213678

The biology of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) finds increasing interest in the scientific community because of the neuromodulatory actions of CRF on brain functions such as learning, anxiety, feeding, and locomotion. Additional actions on immunumodulation and apoptosis have recently been discovered. All actions of CRF are mediated by G protein-coupled receptors, which trigger different, sometimes opposite actions in different regions of the central nervous system. The CRF system exhibits considerable plasticity by the involvement of numerous different ligands, splice variants, and transductional couplings. The generation of multiple splice variants is facilitated by the intron exon structure of the CRF receptor genes.