Porphobilinogen deaminase [PBGD; porphobilinogen ammonia-lyase (polymerizing), EC 4.3

Obesity is a major public health problem and is often associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndrome. Leptin is the crucial adipostatic hormone that controls food intake and body weight through the activation of specific leptin receptors (OB-R) in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus (ARC). However, in most obese patients, high circulating levels of leptin fail to bring about weight loss. The prevention of this ''leptin resistance'' is a major goal for obesity research. We report here a successful prevention of diet-induced obesity (DIO) by silencing a negative regulator of OB-R function, the OB-R gene-related protein (OB-RGRP), whose transcript is genetically linked to the OB-R transcript. We provide in vitro evidence that OB-RGRP controls OB-R function by negatively regulating its cell surface expression. In the DIO mouse model, obesity was prevented by silencing OB-RGRP through stereotactic injection of a lentiviral vector encoding a shRNA directed against OB-RGRP in the ARC. This work demonstrates that OB-RGRP is a potential target for obesity treatment. Indeed, regulators of the receptor could be more appropriate targets than the receptor itself. This finding could serve as the basis for an approach to identifying potential new therapeutic targets for a variety of diseases, including obesity.leptin receptor overlapping transcript ͉ leptin resistance ͉ gene therapy ͉ receptor trafficking ͉ metabolic syndrome L eptin and its receptor (OB-R) were initially identified and characterized because of their involvement in the regulation of energy balance, metabolism, and neuroendocrine responses to food intake (1). Subsequently, leptin has also been shown to be important in wound healing (2), angiogenesis (3), and bone mass and immune system regulation (4, 5). OB-R belongs to the class I cytokine receptor family, which typically uses the JAK/STAT signaling pathway (6). The human OB-R gene on chromosome 1 generates multiple transcripts. Several of these transcripts encode at least five OB-R isoforms, including the short OB-Ra isoform and the long signaling-competent OB-Rb isoform (1). An additional transcript is generated from the same locus encoding a protein called OB-RGRP [or leptin receptor overlapping transcript (LEPROT)], which does not share any sequence similarity with OB-R (7). In situ hybridization experiments show coexpression of the OB-R transcript and the associated OB-RGRP transcript in the mouse brain, including hypothalamic regions involved in body weight regulation (8). Evolutionarily conserved coexpression of two ORFs is often observed in prokaryotes and viruses; however, there are few known cases in eukaryotes (9). Mammals have a single OB-RGRP homologue called LEPROTL1 (leptin receptor overlapping transcript-like 1), that has 70% amino acid sequence similarity with OB-RGRP and whose gene maps on chromosome 8 in humans (10). In yeast, Vps55p, a functional homologue of OB-RGRP, plays a role in protein transport from the Golgi to the vacuole and in the late endoc...