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PloS One 2011Phosphoprotein phosphatases (PPP), these ancient and important regulatory enzymes are present in all eukaryotic organisms. Based on the genome sequences of 12 Drosophila...
Phosphoprotein phosphatases (PPP), these ancient and important regulatory enzymes are present in all eukaryotic organisms. Based on the genome sequences of 12 Drosophila species we traced the evolution of the PPP catalytic subunits and noted a substantial expansion of the gene family. We concluded that the 18-22 PPP genes of Drosophilidae were generated from a core set of 8 indispensable phosphatases that are present in most of the insects. Retropositons followed by tandem gene duplications extended the phosphatase repertoire, and sporadic gene losses contributed to the species specific variations in the PPP complement. During the course of these studies we identified 5, up till now uncharacterized phosphatase retrogenes: PpY+, PpD5+, PpD6+, Pp4+, and Pp6+ which are found only in some ancient Drosophila. We demonstrated that all of these new PPP genes exhibit a distinct male specific expression. In addition to the changes in gene numbers, the intron-exon structure and the chromosomal localization of several PPP genes was also altered during evolution. The G-C content of the coding regions decreased when a gene moved into the heterochromatic region of chromosome Y. Thus the PPP enzymes exemplify the various types of dynamic rearrangements that accompany the molecular evolution of a gene family in Drosophilidae.
Topics: Animals; Catalytic Domain; Drosophila; Drosophila melanogaster; Evolution, Molecular; Gene Expression Regulation, Enzymologic; Gene Rearrangement; Genes, Insect; Male; Multigene Family; Phosphoprotein Phosphatases; Sequence Analysis, DNA; Species Specificity
PubMed: 21789237
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022218 -
ELife Sep 2023Locomotor movements cause visual images to be displaced across the eye, a retinal slip that is counteracted by stabilizing reflexes in many animals. In insects,...
Locomotor movements cause visual images to be displaced across the eye, a retinal slip that is counteracted by stabilizing reflexes in many animals. In insects, optomotor turning causes the animal to turn in the direction of rotating visual stimuli, thereby reducing retinal slip and stabilizing trajectories through the world. This behavior has formed the basis for extensive dissections of motion vision. Here, we report that under certain stimulus conditions, two species, including the widely studied , can suppress and even reverse the optomotor turning response over several seconds. Such 'anti-directional turning' is most strongly evoked by long-lasting, high-contrast, slow-moving visual stimuli that are distinct from those that promote syn-directional optomotor turning. Anti-directional turning, like the syn-directional optomotor response, requires the local motion detecting neurons T4 and T5. A subset of lobula plate tangential cells, CH cells, show involvement in these responses. Imaging from a variety of direction-selective cells in the lobula plate shows no evidence of dynamics that match the behavior, suggesting that the observed inversion in turning direction emerges downstream of the lobula plate. Further, anti-directional turning declines with age and exposure to light. These results show that optomotor turning behaviors contain rich, stimulus-dependent dynamics that are inconsistent with simple reflexive stabilization responses.
Topics: Animals; Drosophila; Rotation; Drosophila melanogaster; Chromosome Inversion; Dissection
PubMed: 37751469
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.86076 -
PloS One 2023Resilin is a natural protein with high extensibility and resilience that plays a key role in the biological processes of insects, such as flight, bouncing, and...
Resilin is a natural protein with high extensibility and resilience that plays a key role in the biological processes of insects, such as flight, bouncing, and vocalization. This study used piggyBac-mediated transgenic technology to stably insert the Drosophila melanogaster resilin gene into the silkworm genome to investigate whether exogenous protein structures improve the mechanical properties of silkworm silk. Molecular detection showed that recombinant resilin was expressed and secreted into silk. Secondary structure and mechanical property analysis showed that the β-sheet content in silk from transgenic silkworms was higher than in wild-type silk. The fracture strength of silk fused with resilin protein was 7.2% higher than wild-type silk. The resilience of recombinant silk after one-time stretching and cyclic stretching was 20.5% and 18.7% higher than wild-type silk, respectively. In summary, Drosophila resilin can enhance the mechanical properties of silk, and this study is the first to improve the mechanical properties of silk using proteins other than spider silk, which broadens the possibilities for the design and application of biomimetic silk materials.
Topics: Animals; Silk; Drosophila melanogaster; Bombyx; Insect Proteins; Drosophila; Animals, Genetically Modified
PubMed: 36867637
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282533 -
Proceedings. Biological Sciences Oct 2019Few invertebrates can survive cryopreservation in liquid nitrogen, and the mechanisms by which some species do survive are underexplored, despite high application...
Few invertebrates can survive cryopreservation in liquid nitrogen, and the mechanisms by which some species do survive are underexplored, despite high application potential. Here, we turn to the drosophilid to strengthen our fundamental understanding of extreme freeze tolerance and gain insights about potential avenues for cryopreservation of biological materials. We first use RNAseq to generate transcriptomes of three larval phenotypic variants: those warm-acclimated in early or late diapause (weak capacity to survive cryopreservation), and those undergoing cold acclimation after diapause entry (extremely freeze tolerant, surviving cryopreservation). We identify mRNA transcripts representing genes and processes that accompany the physiological transition to extreme freeze tolerance and relate cryopreservation survival to the transcriptional profiles of select candidate genes using extended sampling of phenotypic variants. Enhanced capacity for protein folding, refolding and processing appears to be a central theme of extreme freeze tolerance and may allow cold-acclimated larvae to repair or eliminate proteins damaged by freezing (thus mitigating the toxicity of denatured proteins, endoplasmic reticulum stress and subsequent apoptosis). We also find a number of candidate genes (including both known and potentially novel, unannotated sequences) whose expression profiles tightly mirror the change in extreme freeze tolerance status among phenotypic variants.
Topics: Acclimatization; Animals; Drosophilidae; Freezing; Insecta; Transcriptome
PubMed: 31640516
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2019.2019 -
The Journal of Nutrition, Health & Aging 2022Nootropics (smart drugs) are used by students to enhance cognitive performance which have been reported times in recent years. However, some of the nootropics are...
Nootropics (smart drugs) are used by students to enhance cognitive performance which have been reported times in recent years. However, some of the nootropics are central nervous system stimulants which are very likely to lead to addiction or complications such as vomiting and dizziness. Are there nootropics that can improve learning behavior while having potential positive effect on health? Here, we reported that Atomoxetine (ATX) has sex-specific effect on prolonging the life span of female Drosophila melanogaster. Further study indicated that ATX enhanced female resistance to heat stress and their vertical climbing ability, but it did decrease the number of eggs laid. ATX increased food-intake and sleep time both of females and males, and significantly reduced the 24h spontaneous activity of females and males. Our results present the sex dimorphic effect of ATX on life span regulation in Drosophila, and support further research on the beneficial role of ATX and the mechanisms in other animal models.
Topics: Animals; Atomoxetine Hydrochloride; Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity; Drosophila; Drosophila melanogaster; Female; Longevity; Male
PubMed: 35166316
DOI: 10.1007/s12603-022-1741-8 -
PloS One 2022Although insecticide formulations and spray rates are optimized to achieve lethal exposure, there are many factors in agricultural settings that can reduce the effective...
Although insecticide formulations and spray rates are optimized to achieve lethal exposure, there are many factors in agricultural settings that can reduce the effective exposure of insect pests. These include weather patterns, timing of application, chemical degradation/volatilization, plant structural complexity, and resistant populations. While sub-lethal exposure to insecticides can still have negative impacts on pest populations, they can also lead to stimulatory, or hormetic, responses that can increase the fitness of surviving insects. Sub-lethal concentrations may also produce increased tolerance in the offspring of surviving adults through transgenerational effects. Sub-lethal effects are pertinent for the invasive fruit pest, spotted-wing Drosophila, Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura), because its small size, diurnal movement patterns, and utilization of hosts with complex plant structures, such as caneberries and blueberries, make effective insecticide applications tenuous. In this study, we measured spotted-wing Drosophila survivorship, reproductive performance, and offspring tolerance in flies exposed to sub-lethal concentrations of three commonly-used insecticides (zeta-cypermethrin, spinetoram, and pyrethrin). We found some evidence for hormesis, with survival effects being sex- and concentration-dependent for all insecticides. Males were far more susceptible to insecticides than females, which in some cases exhibited higher eclosion success and reproductive rates when exposed to sub-lethal doses. We did not observe significant transgenerational effects at sub-lethal concentrations, despite trends of increased offspring viability for zeta-cypermethrin and spinetoram. More research, however, is needed to fully understand the role that sub-lethal effects may play in pest population dynamics, insecticide efficacy, and the development of genetic resistance.
Topics: Animals; Blueberry Plants; Drosophila; Female; Hormesis; Hymenoptera; Insect Control; Insecticides; Male
PubMed: 35862486
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0271417 -
Journal of Neurochemistry Jan 2021The last common ancestor of humans and fruit flies lived about 800 million years ago, yet both of us have nervous systems that share a number of common important...
The last common ancestor of humans and fruit flies lived about 800 million years ago, yet both of us have nervous systems that share a number of common important features, for example the use of glutamate as a neurotransmitter. We can now possibly add another common feature to the neural tissue of humans and fruit flies which is that of N-acetylaspartylglutamate (NAAG) peptides. This Editorial highlights an article by Kozik and coworkers in the current issue of the Journal of Neurochemistry, in which the authors report the discovery, in Drosophila melanogaster nervous system, of NAA-glutamylglutamate (NAAG2).
Topics: Animals; Aspartic Acid; Dipeptides; Drosophila; Drosophila melanogaster; Nervous System; Pedigree
PubMed: 33197055
DOI: 10.1111/jnc.15213 -
EMBO Reports Apr 2007The generation of bodies and body parts with specific shapes and sizes has been a longstanding issue in biology. Morphogenesis in general and organogenesis in particular... (Review)
Review
The generation of bodies and body parts with specific shapes and sizes has been a longstanding issue in biology. Morphogenesis in general and organogenesis in particular are complex events that involve global changes in cell populations in terms of their proliferation, migration, differentiation and shape. Recent studies have begun to address how these synchronized changes are controlled by the genes that specify cell fate and by the ability of cells to respond to extracellular cues. In particular, a notable shift in this research has occurred owing to the ability to address these issues in the context of the whole organism. For such studies, the Drosophila tracheal system has proven to be a particularly appropriate model. Here, my aim is to highlight some ideas that have arisen through our studies, and those from other groups, of Drosophila tracheal development. Rather than providing an objective review of the features of tracheal development, I intend to discuss some selected notions that I think are relevant to the question of shape generation.
Topics: Animals; Cell Adhesion; Drosophila; Trachea
PubMed: 17401407
DOI: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400942 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Oct 2016Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent among the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been...
Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent among the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be understood as a set of nested subclusters. Although this type of organization holds potential advantages in terms of motion control and neural circuitry, measurements demonstrating this for an animal's entire behavioral repertoire have been limited in scope and temporal complexity. Here, we use a recently developed unsupervised technique to discover and track the occurrence of all stereotyped behaviors performed by fruit flies moving in a shallow arena. Calculating the optimally predictive representation of the fly's future behaviors, we show that fly behavior exhibits multiple time scales and is organized into a hierarchical structure that is indicative of its underlying behavioral programs and its changing internal states.
Topics: Algorithms; Animals; Behavior, Animal; Drosophila; Drosophila melanogaster; Models, Theoretical
PubMed: 27702892
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1607601113 -
Scientific Reports Sep 2023The ability of animals to perceive and respond to sensory information is essential for their survival in diverse environments. While much progress has been made in...
The ability of animals to perceive and respond to sensory information is essential for their survival in diverse environments. While much progress has been made in understanding various sensory modalities, the sense of hygrosensation, which involves the detection and response to humidity, remains poorly understood. In this study, we focused on the hygrosensory, and closely related thermosensory, systems in the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster to unravel the molecular profile of the cells of these senses. Using a transcriptomic analysis of over 37,000 nuclei, we identified twelve distinct clusters of cells corresponding to temperature-sensing arista neurons, humidity-sensing sacculus neurons, and support cells relating to these neurons. By examining the expression of known and novel marker genes, we validated the identity of these clusters and characterized their gene expression profiles. We found that each cell type could be characterized by a unique expression profile of ion channels, GPCR signaling molecules, synaptic vesicle cycle proteins, and cell adhesion molecules. Our findings provide valuable insights into the molecular basis of hygro- and thermosensation. Understanding the mechanisms underlying hygro- and thermosensation may shed light on the broader understanding of sensory systems and their adaptation to different environmental conditions in animals.
Topics: Animals; Drosophila melanogaster; Acetic Acid; Neurons; Cell Nucleus; Ascomycota; Drosophilidae
PubMed: 37709909
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-42506-2