Lage Ricardo, González C Ruth, Diéguez Carlos, López Miguel
Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Neurotoxicology. 2007 Nov;28(6):1129-35. doi: 10.1016/j.neuro.2007.06.003. Epub 2007 Jun 23.
Nicotine has marked effects on sleep, arousal and body weight. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying these actions are not fully understood. Neuropeptide S (NPS) is a recently discovered neuropeptide regulating sleep, anxiety and feeding. Here, we examined the effect of acute and chronic nicotine treatment on the expression of NPS and its receptor (NPS-R) in the hypothalamus and brainstem of rats by using real-time PCR. Our results showed that chronic nicotine treatment induced significant changes in NPS and NPS-R expression whereas acute treatment exclusively induces a marked increase in the mRNA levels of NPS-R in the brainstem. Interestingly, we detected no changes in the expression levels of other set of genes present both in hypothalamus and brainstem. Overall, these data suggest that NPS system is specifically regulated by nicotine in the rat hypothalamus and brainstem.
尼古丁对睡眠、觉醒和体重有显著影响。然而，这些作用背后的神经元机制尚未完全明确。神经肽S（NPS）是最近发现的一种调节睡眠、焦虑和进食的神经肽。在此，我们通过实时PCR检测了急性和慢性尼古丁处理对大鼠下丘脑和脑干中NPS及其受体（NPS-R）表达的影响。我们的结果表明，慢性尼古丁处理诱导了NPS和NPS-R表达的显著变化，而急性处理仅诱导脑干中NPS-R的mRNA水平显著升高。有趣的是，我们未检测到下丘脑和脑干中其他一组基因表达水平的变化。总体而言，这些数据表明NPS系统在大鼠下丘脑和脑干中受到尼古丁的特异性调节。
