GMAP

Where it comes from

Made in

The same neurons as galanin; the galanin precursor is also transcribed in skin keratinocytes

Sent out by

With galanin

Acts on

• Spinal cord reflexes
• Fungi (Candida) in the laboratory

What it does

• Facilitates the spinal flexor reflex in rats, while blocking the facilitation that C fibres cause ¹
• Slows the growth of Candida in the laboratory, which galanin itself does not ²
• Its function in the brain is unknown, and no receptor for it has been found ³

In medicine

• No medicine copies it, and no clinical laboratory measures it
• Nothing has been built on it because there is nothing to aim at: its effects are described by what they do rather than by what they bind ³

Beyond the body’s own use

• Nothing containing it is in trials, approved or obtainable outside the laboratory
• Its one activity galanin does not share is antifungal: fragments of GMAP slowed the growth of several non-albicans Candida species in culture ²
• What is unknown is whether the brain uses it at all. The spinal effects are seen with injected fragments rather than the whole 59-residue peptide, and no animal has been made that keeps galanin and loses GMAP, because one gene makes both ¹