Physiology of the Enteroendocrine System. (360G-Wellcome-106262_Z_14_Z)

Gut hormones help our bodies to detect and respond to what we eat. They act as signals to the brain indicating how hungry or full we should feel, and to the intestines and pancreas to coordinate food digestion and how nutrients are used by the body. The aims of our research are to learn how gut hormones are produced, and how they link dietary intake to human health and diseases such as diabetes and obesity. We hope that drugs and dietary supplements that target the cells producing gut hormones w ill become future treatments for diabetes and obesity. This project will study the production and function of gut hormones, through experiments on single cells, mice and humans. We will try to understand which dietary components make gut hormone levels rise, and the relative importance of hormones produced in different parts of the gut. Our focus will be on two specific hormones: glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which is already used as a basis for several diabetes and obesity drugs, and insulin -like peptide-5 (Insl5), which we recently identified as an appetite promoting hormone produced in the colon.