A Cell-Autonomous Molecular Cascade Initiated by AMP-Activated Protein Kinase Represses Steroidogenesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Steroid hormones regulate essential physiological processes, and inadequate levels are associated with various pathological conditions. In testosterone-producing Leydig cells, steroidogenesis is strongly stimulated by luteinizing hormone (LH) via its receptor leading to increased cyclic AMP (cAMP) production and expression of the steroidogenic acute regulatory (STAR) protein, which is essential for the initiation of steroidogenesis. Steroidogenesis then passively decreases with the degradation of cAMP into AMP by phosphodiesterases. In this study, we show that AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is activated following cAMP-to-AMP breakdown in MA-10 and MLTC-1 Leydig cells. Activated AMPK then actively inhibits cAMP-induced steroidogenesis by repressing the expression of key regulators of steroidogenesis, including Star and Nr4a1. Similar results were obtained in Y-1 adrenal cells and in the constitutively steroidogenic R2C cells. We have also determined that maximum AMPK activation following stimulation of steroidogenesis in MA-10 Leydig cells occurs when steroid hormone production has reached a plateau. Our data identify AMPK as a molecular rheostat that actively represses steroid hormone biosynthesis to preserve cellular energy homeostasis and prevent excess steroid production.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".