A vitamin B2 sensing mechanism that regulates gut protease activity to impact animal’s food behavior and growth
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Colorado Boulder, United States
Abstract
To survive challenging environments, animals acquired the ability to evaluate food quality in the intestine and respond to nutrient deficiencies with changes in food-response behavior, metabolism and development. However, the regulatory mechanisms underlying intestinal sensing of specific nutrients, especially micronutrients such as vitamins, and the connections to downstream physiological responses in animals remain underexplored. We have established a system to analyze the intestinal response to vitamin B2 (VB2) deficiency in C. elegans, and demonstrated that VB2 level critically impacts food uptake and foraging behavior by regulating specific protease gene expression and intestinal protease activity. We show that this impact is mediated by TORC1 signaling through reading the FAD-dependent ATP level. Thus, our study in live animals uncovers a VB2 sensing/response pathway that regulates food-uptake, a mechanism by which a common signaling pathway translates a specific nutrient signal into physiological activities, and the importance of gut microbiota in supplying micronutrients to animals.
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Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- Bin Qi
- Marina Kniazeva
- Min Han
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Qi 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.
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A vitamin B2 sensing mechanism that regulates gut protease activity to impact animal’s food behavior and growth
eLife 6:e26243.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.26243
