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Turtle ghrelin

Nature Genetics volume 46, pages 524–525 (2014)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

The genomes of two turtle species, the Chinese soft-shell turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) and the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), were recently reported to lack the gene for the hunger-stimulating peptide hormone ghrelin1. Because ghrelin is one of only a few appetite-stimulating signals from the gastrointestinal tract, it would be surprising if it were missing in these turtles, especially as a ghrelin-encoding sequence has previously been reported for the red-eared slider turtle Trachemys scripta elegans2. We therefore performed BLAST searches in the turtle genome databases using the preproghrelin amino acid sequences from the red-eared slider turtle and human as queries (for details on materials and methods, see the Supplementary Note).

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Figure 1: Amino acid sequence alignment of predicted preproghrelin sequences.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neuroscience, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Dan Larhammar & David Lagman

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  1. Dan Larhammar
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  2. David Lagman
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Correspondence to Dan Larhammar.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–4 (PDF 361 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Supplementary Table 1 (PDF 70 kb)

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Larhammar, D., Lagman, D. Turtle ghrelin. Nat Genet 46, 524–525 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.2960

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This article is cited by

  • Turtle ghrelin

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    Nature Genetics (2014)

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