Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is a major hypophysiotropic peptide regulating pituitary-adrenal response to stress, and it is also widely expressed in the central nervous system. The recent cloning of cDNAs encoding the human and rat CRF receptors has enabled us to map the distribution of cells expressing CRF receptor mRNA in rat brain and pituitary by in situ hybridization. Receptor expr...

Although considerable progress has been achieved in the study of the coagulation of plasma by staphylocoagulase, the precise identity of the coagulase-reacting factor (CRF) has remained in doubt. The claims linking CRF with various factors involved in the dotting of blood have been recently summarized elsewhere (1). Questions pertaining to the possible relation of CRF to prothrombin have remain...

Receptors for corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) are members of a family of G protein-coupled receptors ("Family B") that respond to a variety of structurally dissimilar releasing factors, neuropeptides, and hormones (including secretin, growth hormone-releasing factor, calcitonin, parathyroid hormone, pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide, and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) ...

Stress-induced plasticity in the brain requires a precisely orchestrated sequence of cellular events involving novel as well as well known mediators. We have previously demonstrated that tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) in the amygdala promotes stress-induced synaptic plasticity and anxiety-like behavior. Here, we show that tPA activity in the amygdala is up-regulated by a major stress neurom...

Conditional Random Field (CRF) and recurrent neural models have achieved success in structured prediction. More recently, there is a marriage of CRF and recurrent neural models, so that we can gain from both non-linear dense features and globally normalized CRF objective. These recurrent neural CRF models mainly focus on encode node features in CRF undirected graphs. However, edge features prov...

According to recent reports, chronic renal failure (CRF) increases the susceptibility of gastric mucosa to injury. Since nitric oxide plays a major role in gastric mucosal defense and injury, we investigated, in rats with CRF produced by five-sixths nephrectomy and in control rats, the expression of nitric oxide synthase (NOS) in the stomach and measured mucosal and submucosal gastric blood flo...

Here we describe the properties of CP-154,526, a potent and selective nonpeptide antagonist of corticotropin (ACTH) releasing factor (CRF) receptors. CP-154,526 binds with high affinity to CRF receptors (Ki < 10 nM) and blocks CRF-stimulated adenylate cyclase activity in membranes prepared from rat cortex and pituitary. Systemically administered CP-154,526 antagonizes the stimulatory effects of...

Chronic renal failure (CRF) patients on prolonged dialysis have been found to have significant alteration in their thyroid status, but little is known about the same in undialyzed CRF patients. Oxidative stress has been implicated as the key player in altering the levels of thyroid hormone in euthyroid sick syndrome. This study was performed to evaluate the levels of oxidative stress and thyroi...

Fear is a graded central motive state ranging from mild to intense. As threat intensity increases, fear transitions from discriminative to generalized. The circuit mechanisms that process threats of different intensity are not well resolved. Here, we isolate a unique population of locally projecting neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA) that produce the neuropeptide corticotropin...

Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) has potent behavioral effects when administered intracerebroventricularly to rats. CRF and its receptors are found in an uneven distribution in the brain. In an effort to localize the site of the anorectic effect of CRF, exogenous CRF or saline was injected into cannulas directed toward the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus (PVN), lateral hypothalamus, ve...