Odile Viltart & Virginie Tolle, PhD, from the Psychiatry & Neurosciences Center in Paris, validated Bertin Bioreagent’s immunoassay kits by demonstrating the absence of immunoreactivity for both acyl & desacyl ghrelin in preproghrelin deficient mice…
These past years, our research has been focused on understanding the role of preproghrelin, a complex prohormone encoding various peptides (acyl and desacyl ghrelin, obestatin) with structural and functional heterogeneity, in the pathophysiology of eating disorders. Our aim was to evaluate the relative ratio of these peptides in undernutrition conditions in both rodents and humans. The absence of selective and reliable assays to measure all three ghrelinderived in the same biological sample was a limitation to understand how these key gastrointestinal peptides were regulated in pathological conditions.
First, we validated Bertin Bioreagent’s immunoassay kits by demonstrating the absence of immunoreactivity for both acyl and desacyl ghrelin in preproghrelin deficient mice (Hassouna et al. 2014). Since immunoassays kits have been developed in multi-species, we are able to use them for explorations in different models: rat, mouse, human.
Thus, we were able to assay ghrelin in both obesity (Lacroix et al. 2015) and undernutrition states in both animal models (Méquinion et al. 2015) and AN patients in collaboration with members of the interdisciplinary network on eating disorders, GIR-AFDAS-TCA (www.anorexieboulimie-afdas.fr) and CMME5 (Paris, France). Exploration of these biomarkers in preclinical and clinical studies is essential to better understand the pathophysiology of the disease. In
collaboration with Bertin Technologies, we have worked on optimizing the conditions of sampling, treatment and storage of samples.
Such assays have several advantages:
- they are developed in multi-species, from rodent (rat and mouse) to human, which is ideal for preclinical to clinical investigations,
- they are specific for different isoforms of the same peptide (such as acyl versus desacyl ghrelin) that can have various biological effects (Delhanty et al. 2013),
- they are sensitive enough to detect small concentrations or variation ranges,
- they are reproducible and designed to recover peptides with post-translational modifications (such as acylation) with specific treatment.
By Odile Viltart and Virginie Tolle, PhD – INSERM UMR894 – Centre de Psychiatrie et Neurosciences, Paris, FRANCE
