The neuropeptide F/nitric oxide pathway is essential for shaping locomotor plasticity underlying locust phase transition
- Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Abstract
Behavioral plasticity is widespread in swarming animals, however little is known about its underlying neural and molecular mechanisms. Here, we report that a neuropeptide F (NPF)/nitric oxide (NO) pathway plays a critical role in the locomotor plasticity of swarming migratory locusts. Two related neuropeptides, NPF1a and NPF2, show reduced levels of their encoding transcripts during crowding, and the transcript levels of their receptors significantly increase during locust isolation. Both of these NPFs have suppressive effects on phase-related locomotor activity. A key downstream mediator for both NPFs is nitric oxide synthase (NOS) which regulates phase-related locomotor activity by controlling NO synthesis in the locust brain. Mechanistically, NPF1a and NPF2 modify NOS activity by separately suppressing its phosphorylation and lowering its transcript level, effects that are mediated by their respective receptors. Our results uncover a hierarchical neurochemical mechanism underlying behavioral plasticity in the swarming locust and provide insights into the NPF/NO axis.
Data availability
-
Locusta migratoria transcriptomePublicly available at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (accession no: SRP092214).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Chinese Academy of Sciences (Strategic Priority Research Program (Grant NO. XDB11010000))
- Xianhui Wang
- Le Kang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Youth fund (Grant NO. 31601875))
- Li Hou
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Hou 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
-
- 12,464
- views
-
- 532
- downloads
-
- 37
- 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)
The neuropeptide F/nitric oxide pathway is essential for shaping locomotor plasticity underlying locust phase transition
eLife 6:e22526.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22526
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine
Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) have great potential to be used as alternatives to embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in regenerative medicine and disease modelling. In this study, we characterise the proteomes of multiple hiPSC and hESC lines derived from independent donors and find that while they express a near-identical set of proteins, they show consistent quantitative differences in the abundance of a subset of proteins. hiPSCs have increased total protein content, while maintaining a comparable cell cycle profile to hESCs, with increased abundance of cytoplasmic and mitochondrial proteins required to sustain high growth rates, including nutrient transporters and metabolic proteins. Prominent changes detected in proteins involved in mitochondrial metabolism correlated with enhanced mitochondrial potential, shown using high-resolution respirometry. hiPSCs also produced higher levels of secreted proteins, including growth factors and proteins involved in the inhibition of the immune system. The data indicate that reprogramming of fibroblasts to hiPSCs produces important differences in cytoplasmic and mitochondrial proteins compared to hESCs, with consequences affecting growth and metabolism. This study improves our understanding of the molecular differences between hiPSCs and hESCs, with implications for potential risks and benefits for their use in future disease modelling and therapeutic applications.
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics
Dynamic conformational and structural changes in proteins and protein complexes play a central and ubiquitous role in the regulation of protein function, yet it is very challenging to study these changes, especially for large protein complexes, under physiological conditions. Here, we introduce a novel isobaric crosslinker, Qlinker, for studying conformational and structural changes in proteins and protein complexes using quantitative crosslinking mass spectrometry. Qlinkers are small and simple, amine-reactive molecules with an optimal extended distance of ~10 Å, which use MS2 reporter ions for relative quantification of Qlinker-modified peptides derived from different samples. We synthesized the 2-plex Q2linker and showed that the Q2linker can provide quantitative crosslinking data that pinpoints key conformational and structural changes in biosensors, binary and ternary complexes composed of the general transcription factors TBP, TFIIA, and TFIIB, and RNA polymerase II complexes.
