In the process, one molecule of O2 is consumed and the glycine residue is removed from the peptide and converted to glyoxylic acid.
Replacing the carboxylic acid group with an amide group makes the peptide more hydrophobic and more likely to be neutrally charged at physiologic pH, and it is believed that these neutrally charged peptide amides can more easily bind to receptors.
These catalytic domains work sequentially to catalyze neuroendocrine peptides to active alpha-amidated products.
[9] Multiple alternatively spliced transcript variants encoding different isoforms have been described for this gene, but some of their full-length sequences are not yet known.
Simpson et al 2015 finds insect PαAMs to respond to hypoxia by regulating the activity of several peptide hormones.