Kir7.1 is the physiological target for hormones and steroids that regulate uteroplacental function
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Preterm birth is a multifactorial syndrome that is detrimental to the well-being of both the mother and the newborn. During normal gestation, the myometrium is maintained in a quiescent state by the action of progesterone. As a steroid hormone, progesterone is thought to modify uterine and placental morphology by altering gene expression, but a nongenomic mode of action has long been suspected. Here we reveal that progesterone activates both human and murine inwardly rectifying potassium channel Kir7.1, which is expressed in mammalian myometrial smooth muscle and placental pericytes during late gestation. Kir7.1 is also activated by compounds used to prevent premature labor, including the progestogens 17-alpha-hydroxyprogesterone caproate and dydrogesterone, revealing an unexpected mode of action for these drugs. Our results reveal that Kir7.1 is the molecular target of a number of endogenous and synthetic steroids that control uterine excitability and placental function, and is therefore a promising therapeutic target to control utero-placental physiology and support healthy pregnancy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".