UNIST NBC SEMINAR Drosophila Sensory Signaling Speaker Seok
UNIST NBC SEMINAR Drosophila Sensory Signaling Speaker : Seok Jun Moon, Ph. D. Department of Oral Biology, Yonsei University College of Dentistry Animals show many different behavioral responses to environmental, sensory cues to survive and communicate with each other. To detect sensory cues, their specific receptors have to be expressed in specialized sensory neurons and localized in proper intracellular places. First of all, I will focus specifically on how Drosophila taste receptors function. Then, it will be covered how to ensure the hearing receptors to move to the right place in the cells. Taste is one of chemical senses to detect water soluble chemicals. In Drosophila, there are 68 gustatory receptors (GRs) in the genome. They are predicted as seven transmembrane domain proteins, which makes Drosophila GRs assumed to be GPCRs. However, unexpectedly Drosophila GR related olfactory receptors (ORs) are reported as cation channels. Even though the function of some of GR in vivo has been identified so far, it is not clear what the molecular identity of GRs is and how they function in vivo. I will discuss recent work from my lab to investigate the function of GRs. The mutation in Tubby locus of mice causes a late onset obesity and neurosensory deficits such as retinal degeneration and hearing loss. Tubby is a founding member of Tubby family protein consisting of Tubby, Tulp 1, Tulp 2 and Tulp 3. However, despite the important role in metabolism and function of sensory neurons, the molecular mechanism of Tubby protein remains elusive. We turned into Drosophila to understand the biochemical function of Tubby protein, since it has only one Tubby gene in the genome. I will discuss our progress on characterization of Tubby in Drosophila. 16: 00 PM on Jan 15 (Tue) Engineering Building 1, Room 711 Prof. Chan Young Park(2539) cypark@unist. ac. kr
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