The hormones Peptide YY and Leptin can have an opposite effect on the appetite, causing the sensation of being full.
The author devotes multiple chapters of her book to the events that led to the co-discovery of the Leptin gene in 1994.
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Based on interviews with the parties involved, she reports that Leptin was co-discovered at Rockefeller University by Rudolph Leibel, Jeffrey Friedman, and members of their laboratories, and explains why Leibel and others were excluded by Friedman in the scientific paper that announced the discovery.
His research on leptin and obesity published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation was the second paper to explore leptin.
After co-discovering the Leptin gene with Jeffrey Friedman et al. in 1994, which involved a reverse genetic/positional cloning strategy to clone ob and db, Rudolph Leibel, working with collaborators at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and colleague Streamson Chua, confirmed cloning of the leptin receptor by demonstrating that an apparent leptin receptor cloned from a choroid plexus library using leptin as ligand, mapped to a physical map that included db and fa.
After completing her studies in mathematics and biology at the University of Bonn and the University of Heidelberg, Maria Leptin worked for her PhD at Basel Institute for Immunology, Switzerland, (1979-1983) studying the B-lymphocytes activation under the supervision of Fritz Melchers.