RESUMO
In all organisms, salts produce either appetitive or aversive responses depending on the concentration. While low-salt concentration in food elicits positive responses to ingest, high-salt triggers aversion. Still the mechanisms involved in this dual behavior have just started to be uncovered in some organisms. In Rhodnius prolixus, using pharmacological and behavioral assays, we demonstrated that upon high-salt detection in food a nitric oxide (NO) dependent cascade is activated. This activation involves a soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) and the production of cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP). Thus, appetitive responses to low-salt diets turn to aversion whenever this cascade is activated. Conversely, insects feed over aversive high-salt solutions when it is blocked by reducing NO levels or by affecting the sGC activity. The activation of NO/sGC/cGMP cascade commands the avoidance feeding behavior in R. prolixus. Investigations in other insect species should examine the possibility that high-salt aversion is mediated by NO/sSG/cGMP signaling.
Assuntos
Guanilato Ciclase/metabolismo , Óxido Nítrico/metabolismo , Rhodnius/efeitos dos fármacos , Cloreto de Sódio/metabolismo , Animais , GMP Cíclico/química , Dieta Hipossódica , Guanilato Ciclase/química , Insetos/efeitos dos fármacos , Insetos/metabolismo , Óxido Nítrico/química , Rhodnius/química , Rhodnius/metabolismo , Transdução de Sinais/efeitos dos fármacos , Cloreto de Sódio/química , Cloreto de Sódio/farmacologiaRESUMO
Motivation: MIToS is an environment for mutual information analysis and a framework for protein multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and protein structures (PDB) management in Julia language. It integrates sequence and structural information through SIFTS, making Pfam MSAs analysis straightforward. MIToS streamlines the implementation of any measure calculated from residue contingency tables and its optimization and testing in terms of protein contact prediction. As an example, we implemented and tested a BLOSUM62-based pseudo-count strategy in mutual information analysis. Availability and Implementation: The software is totally implemented in Julia and supported for Linux, OS X and Windows. It's freely available on GitHub under MIT license: http://mitos.leloir.org.ar . Contacts: diegozea@gmail.com or cmb@leloir.org.ar. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.