Abstract
Two pentapeptides, the enkephalins (Fig. 1a), have been isolated from the mammalian brain and have been shown to be potent opiate agonists1,2. Further work has demonstrated that the opiate analgesics themselves interact competitively with the receptor sites for these endogenous pentapeptides. This explains in a simple and elegant manner the occurrence of opiate receptors in nervous tissue3,4; clearly it was unlikely that they were there to interact solely with the opiates. As the enkephalins and opiates are competing for the same receptors and give a similar pharmacological response it is likely that they have structural and conformational similarities. Hughes et al. have shown that both of these small peptides contain a tyrosine residue at the amino terminal position2. We consider here the significance of that finding for the conformational relationship between the enkephalins and opiates.
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HORN, A., RODGERS, J. Structural and conformational relationships between the enkephalins and the opiates. Nature 260, 795–797 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1038/260795a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/260795a0
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