UMMS Affiliation
Department of Neurobiology; Alkema Lab
Publication Date
2019-07-18
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins | Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience | Nervous System
Abstract
Biogenic amine neurotransmitters play a central role in metazoan biology, and both their chemical structures and cognate receptors are evolutionarily conserved. Their primary roles are in cell-to-cell signaling, as biogenic amines are not normally recruited for communication between separate individuals. Here, we show that in the nematode C. elegans, a neurotransmitter-sensing G protein-coupled receptor, TYRA-2, is required for avoidance responses to osas#9, an ascaroside pheromone that incorporates the neurotransmitter, octopamine. Neuronal ablation, cell-specific genetic rescue, and calcium imaging show that tyra-2 expression in the nociceptive neuron, ASH, is necessary and sufficient to induce osas#9 avoidance. Ectopic expression in the AWA neuron, which is generally associated with attractive responses, reverses the response to osas#9, resulting in attraction instead of avoidance behavior, confirming that TYRA-2 partakes in the sensing of osas#9. The TYRA-2/osas#9 signaling system represents an inter-organismal communication channel that evolved via co-option of a neurotransmitter and its cognate receptor.
Keywords
Cellular neuroscience, Olfactory receptors
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
DOI of Published Version
10.1038/s41467-019-11240-7
Source
Nat Commun. 2019 Jul 18;10(1):3186. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11240-7. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Nature communications
Related Resources
PubMed ID
31320626
Repository Citation
Chute, Christopher D.; DiLoreto, Elizabeth M.; Zhang, Ying K.; Reilly, Douglas K.; Rayes, Diego; Coyle, Veronica L.; Choi, Hee June; Alkema, Mark J.; Schroeder, Frank C.; and Srinivasan, Jagan, "Co-option of neurotransmitter signaling for inter-organismal communication in C. elegans" (2019). Neurobiology Publications and Presentations. 244.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/neurobiology_pp/244
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Amino Acids, Peptides, and Proteins Commons, Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience Commons, Nervous System Commons