Talk:Orphan receptor

Is the PCP site an adopted orphan, this paper seems to say so, but it's from 1987(?!) PMID: 2887250. Nagelfar (talk) 21:09, 17 March 2017 (UTC) Reply

This topic is to discuss the page-needs-updating flag that states: "Ligands are now partially identified along with a few other new discoveries," along with corresponding edits. I feel this concern is based on a misunderstanding of the semantics. Sure, ligands are often found for some previously orphaned receptors, but then they cease to be true orphans, and their names are generally changed to reflect our new understanding. That doesn’t mean that the meaning of the word "orphan receptor" itself has changed. Though it does bring up a good point that this transition can take time before people stop calling the receptors "orphan receptors," so I’ll try to address that in editing Pabnau (talk) 04:43, 29 May 2026 (UTC) Reply

Looking through some more sources, I do see a couple old sources which define orphan (nuclear) receptors as a fixed set of receptors that originally didn’t have known ligands, but from what I can find this seems to be a less common usage of the term. The original lede didn’t emphasize the required "physiological relevance" of the ligand (as mentioned in the reference), so I’m hoping that new version is clear enough to resolve the concerns of the previous editor.

Though if someone can think of a clean and not confusing way of also explaining that some authors use an alternative definition, I feel that would be fine too. I was not able to think of a way. Pabnau (talk) 05:25, 29 May 2026 (UTC) Reply