Do We Know All Hormones Yet?

lisab

I was idly reading this article...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43446129...and_nutrition/

...when I came to this passage:

Really, is it believed that we don't know all of the hormones in our system? If so, is it likely that there are "many" that we don't know about yet?

If so, how come?

SW VandeCarr

We probably know most, if not all, of the important hormones secreted by the major endocrine glands, but there's evidence that there may be many intercellular hormones that are secreted by cells that are not part of the usually recognized endocrine glands (adrenal, thyroid, parathyroid, pituitary, etc.)

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...758811,00.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...258434/?page=1

Proton Soup

new ones are being found all the time. i think the way it usually comes about is that an effect is seen for which there is no known mechanism. and then the hunt for the mechanism begins. or maybe they find a new receptor, but with no known agent to bind to it.

Ryan_m_b

An interesting and surprising observation that was made after we sequenced the human genome was that there are ~30,000 genes and an estimated ~100,000 proteins. This is thanks to alternative splicing, polyadenylation and post-transcriptional/translational modification.

Mapping the human transcriptome and proteome is an even bigger task than the genome! On top of that we're still a long way from having a complete map of the metabolome, suffice to say we'll have to wait a while before we know all of what goes into making a human!