Researchers discover a new way in which insulin interacts with its receptor

Since the discovery of insulin nearly 100 years ago, scientists have explored how it interacts with its receptor with the goal of improving the ability of therapeutic insulins to mimic the way insulin works in the body. In a new study, researchers have solved a critical piece of the puzzle by showing how insulin interacts with its receptor at a second binding site. The team of scientists from the Paul Langerhans Institute Dresden (a satellite of Helmholtz Zentrum München and a partner of the German Center for Diabetes Research) and the Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus at TU Dresden in Germany, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, Germany, McGill University in Canada, and the University of Helsinki in Finland will publish their results Nov. 14, 2019, in the The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB).