Leptin's long-distance call to the pancreas

Monday, December 22, 2008 - 11:49 in Physics & Chemistry

Rube Goldberg—the cartoonist who devised complex machines for simple tasks—would have smiled at one of leptin's mechanisms for curbing insulin release. As Hinoi et al. show, the fat-derived hormone enlists the sympathetic nervous system to prevent bone-making cells from releasing a molecule that prods the pancreas to discharge insulin.

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