TMT-Opsins differentially modulate medaka brain function in a context-dependent manner

by Bruno M. Fontinha, Theresa Zekoll, Mariam Al-Rawi, Miguel Gallach, Florian Reithofer, Alison J. Barker, Maximilian Hofbauer, Ruth M. Fischer, Arndt von Haeseler, Herwig Baier, Kristin Tessmar-Raible Vertebrate behavior is strongly influenced by light. Light receptors, encoded by functional opsin proteins, are present inside the vertebrate brain and peripheral tissues. This expression feature is present from fishes to human and appears to be particularly prominent in diurnal vertebrates. Despi te their conserved widespread occurrence, the nonvisual functions of opsins are still largely enigmatic. This is even more apparent when considering the high number of opsins. Teleosts possess around 40 opsin genes, present from young developmental stages to adulthood. Many of these opsins have been shown to function as light receptors. This raises the question of whether this large number might mainly reflect functional redundancy or rather maximally enables teleosts to optimally use the complex light information present under water. We focus ontmt-opsin1b andtmt-opsin2, c-opsins with ancestral-type sequence features, conserved across several vertebrate phyla, expressed with partly similar expression in non-rod, non-cone, non-retinal-ganglion-cell brain tissues and with a similar spectral sensitivity. The characterization of the single mutants revealed age- and light-dependent behavioral changes, as well as an impact on the levels of the preprohormonesst1b and the voltage-gated sodi...
Source: PLoS Biology: Archived Table of Contents - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research