The study shows that cortistatin, a brain peptide similar to somatostatin, can attach to the same receptors that ghrelin and synthetic compounds like hexarelin use, while regular somatostatin fragments cannot. This suggests cortistatin might naturally influence growth hormone pathways, but the research is still early and done in lab tissue, not in people.

Antagonism between GH secretagogues (GHS) and somatostatin (SRIH) has been postulated and demonstrated, but SRIH does not bind to GHS receptors (GHS-R) and potent synthetic peptidyl GHS (GHRP6, hexarelin) do not displace radiolabeled SRIH from its receptors. However, non-natural SRIH octapeptide agonists (mainly lanreotide and vapreotide) displace 125I-Tyr-Ala-hexarelin from pituitary binding sites suggesting that an endogenous factor related to SRIH might exist and interact with GHS-R. Our aims were to investigate the ability of different SRIH-like peptides such as various SRIH fragments (SRIH 3-14, SRIH 7-14, SRIH 3-10, SRIH 7-10, SRIH 2-9) and a natural neuropeptide that shows a high structural homology with SRIH such as cortistatin-14 (CST) to compete with 125I-Tyr-Ala-hexarelin for human pituitary binding sites and to compare their binding affinity with that of hexarelin and ghrelin, a gastric-derived peptidyl GHS that has been proposed as a natural ligand of GHS-R. While the binding of 125I-Tyr-Ala-hexarelin to pituitary membranes was completely displaced by unlabelled hexarelin, ghrelin and CST, none of the SRIH fragments tested inhibited this binding. Ghrelin and CST exhibited a similar affinity (4.6-5.4 x 10(-7) mol/l) for the binding while hexarelin was more effective by about four orders of magnitude in displacing 125I-Tyr-Ala-hexarelin. Our data demonstrate for the first time that cortistatin, a natural peptide related to SRIH, binds to GHS-R and suggest that this factor may play a role in modulating the activity of these receptors.