Insulin the simplest unicellular eukaryotes. Apart from animals, insulin-like proteins are also known to exist in the Fungi and Protista kingdoms. Insulin is produced by beta cells of the pancreatic islets in most vertebrates and by the Brockmann body in some teleost fish. Cone snails "Conus geographus" and "Conus tulipa", venomous sea snails that hunt small fish, use modified forms of insulin in their venom cocktails. The insulin toxin, closer in structure to fishes' than to snails' native insulin, slows down the prey fishes by lowering their blood glucose levels. The preproinsulin precursor of insulin is encoded by the "INS" gene.
Insulin the brand name Humulin. The vast majority of insulin currently used worldwide is now biosynthetic recombinant "human" insulin or its analogues. Recombinant insulin is produced either in yeast (usually "Saccharomyces cerevisiae") or "E. coli". In yeast, insulin may be engineered as a single-chain protein with a KexII endoprotease (a yeast homolog of PCI/PCII) site that separates the insulin A chain from a c-terminally truncated insulin B chain. A chemically synthesized c-terminal tail is then grafted onto insulin by reverse proteolysis using the inexpensive protease trypsin; typically the lysine on the c-terminal tail is protected with a chemical protecting group to