Nucleophile sensitivity of Drosophila TRPA1 underlies light-induced feeding deterrence
- Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Republic of Korea
- Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea
- Sejong University, Republic of Korea
Abstract
Solar irradiation including ultraviolet (UV) light causes tissue damage by generating reactive free radicals that can be electrophilic or nucleophilic due to unpaired electrons. Little is known about how free radicals induced by natural sunlight are rapidly detected and avoided by animals. We discover that Drosophila Transient Receptor Potential Ankyrin 1 (TRPA1), previously known only as an electrophile receptor, sensitively detects photochemically active sunlight through nucleophile sensitivity. Rapid light-dependent feeding deterrence in Drosophila was mediated only by the TRPA1(A) isoform, despite the TRPA1(A) and TRPA1(B) isoforms having similar electrophile sensitivities. Such isoform dependentce re-emerges in the detection of structurally varied nucleophilic compounds and nucleophilicity-accompanying hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Furthermore, these isoform-dependent mechanisms require a common set of TRPA1(A)-specific residues dispensable for electrophile detection. Collectively, TRPA1(A) rapidly responds to natural sunlight intensities through its nucleophile sensitivity as a receptor of photochemically generated radicals, leading to an acute light-induced behavioral shift in Drosophila.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Ministry of Education (NRF-2015R1D1A1A01057288)
- KyeongJin Kang
Ministry of Education (2015H-1A2A-1034723)
- Tae Jung Ahn
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, Du et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,535
- views
-
- 458
- downloads
-
- 34
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Nucleophile sensitivity of Drosophila TRPA1 underlies light-induced feeding deterrence
eLife 5:e18425.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.18425
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Control of voluntary limb movement is predominantly attributed to the contralateral motor cortex. However, increasing evidence suggests the involvement of ipsilateral cortical networks in this process, especially in motor tasks requiring bilateral coordination, such as locomotion. In this study, we combined a unilateral thoracic spinal cord injury (SCI) with a cortical neuroprosthetic approach to investigate the functional role of the ipsilateral motor cortex in rat movement through spared contralesional pathways. Our findings reveal that in all SCI rats, stimulation of the ipsilesional motor cortex promoted a bilateral synergy. This synergy involved the elevation of the contralateral foot along with ipsilateral hindlimb extension. Additionally, in two out of seven animals, stimulation of a sub-region of the hindlimb motor cortex modulated ipsilateral hindlimb flexion. Importantly, ipsilateral cortical stimulation delivered after SCI immediately alleviated multiple locomotor and postural deficits, and this effect persisted after ablation of the homologous motor cortex. These results provide strong evidence of a causal link between cortical activation and precise ipsilateral control of hindlimb movement. This study has significant implications for the development of future neuroprosthetic technology and our understanding of motor control in the context of SCI.
-
- Neuroscience
Mice can generate a cognitive map of an environment based on self-motion signals when there is a fixed association between their starting point and the location of their goal.
