Posted April 24, 2007 Atlanta Communications and Marketing
Contact David Terraso When a person's under stress or injured,
the adrenal gland releases cortisol to help restore the body's
functions to normal. But the hormone's effects are many and
varied, lowering the activity of the immune system, helping
create memories with short-term exposure, while impairing
learning if there's too much for too long. Given the variety of
its effects,understanding how cortisol is made is essential to
producing medications that can alter its production. Scientists
at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered an
important step in cortisol production, finding that although the
output of the hormone is continuous, the molecular production is
cyclic in nature - involving a rhythmic binding and unbinding of
a protein essential to its production. The research, which
increases understanding of how the brain and the endocrine
system work together to regulate health, appears in the February
issue of the journal Molecular End