About the Authors

Katerina V. Savelieva

*ksavelieva@lexpharma.com

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Shulei Zhao

Contributed equally to this work with: Shulei Zhao, Vladimir M. Pogorelov

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Vladimir M. Pogorelov

Contributed equally to this work with: Shulei Zhao, Vladimir M. Pogorelov

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Indrani Rajan

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Qi Yang

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Emily Cullinan

Current address: Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Thomas H. Lanthorn

Affiliation Lexicon Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, The Woodlands, Texas, United States of America

Competing Interests

All of the authors of this paper are employed by Lexicon Pharmaceuticals and did the work as part of their employment. As employees of this publicly traded company, they all receive stock options as part of their compensation. Moreover, Thomas Lanthorn is an Officer of the company. Lexicon has a compound in clinical trials that targets peripheral TPH, in particular the activity of TPH1. This does not impact the present results in any way. The characterization of these compounds has recently been published in JPET (Liu et al., 2008). We have no program directed at TPH2. We understand that Lexicon has a patent on the TPH2 sequence, granted in Europe. This is simply a consequence of our early understanding that another synthetic enzyme was likely to exist based on the results from our initial TPH (TPH1) KO mouse.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: KVS QMY EC THL. Performed the experiments: KVS SZ VVMP IR QMY EC. Analyzed the data: KVS SZ VVMP IR QMY. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: EC THL. Wrote the paper: KVS SZ VVMP IR THL.