121st General Meeting of the KCS

Type Symposium
Area Current Trends in Biological Chemistry
Room No. Room 203
Time FRI 10:00-:
Code BIO3-4
Subject Molecular genetic insights of a pleiotropic neuropeptide myoinhbitory peptide
Authors Young-Joon Kim
School of Life Sciences, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Abstract The neuropeptide represents the most ancient type of signaling molecules, critical for intercellular communications underlying a plethora of biological processes. Here, I discuss a series of our studies using Drosophila melanogaster, a genetically amendable animal model, which together uncover molecular and neural mechanisms underlying the functional pleiotropy of a neuropeptide myoinhibitory peptide (MIP). We discovered that MIP regulates at least three distinct biological processes; sleep, feeding, and mating. We showed earlier that MIP is a potent ligand for the sex peptide receptor (SPR), which initially identified as a receptor for sex peptide (SP), the seminal protein evoking the post-mating responses in females. Unlike SP, MIP is not involved in the post-mating responses. Instead, both MIP and SPR are critical for consolidating the sleep state. We also uncovered MIP signal is crucial for the satiety. Mip mutant is hardly satiated after feeding and become obese. Unlike sleep behavior, however, SPR seems not involved in the MIP-dependent satiety responses, suggesting that MIP signals through a receptor(s) other than SPR. Lastly and the most recently, we have shown that Mip promotes mating receptivity both in virgins and mated females, again SPR-independently. We mapped each of these biological functions to three distinct groups of MIP neurons, respectively. We propose that a pleiotropic neuropeptide regulates multiple functions via distinct receptors.
E-mail yjkim108@gmail.com