Footprints of Butterfly Rhodopsin Functional Evolution

蝴蝶视紫红质功能进化的足迹

• 批准号: 0346765
• 负责人: Adriana Briscoe
• 金额: $ 39.4万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-03-01 至 2008-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0346765&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Footprints; Butterfly; Rhodopsin; Functional; Evolution

Many insects are equipped with eyes and brains that have the potential for color vision, the ability to distinguish wavelengths of light from one another regardless of intensity or brightness. This results from the expression of different kinds of light sensitive visual pigment rhodopsin molecules in photoreceptor cells. Butterfly visual systems have tremendous physiological variation in the sensitivity of their green- and red-sensitive rhodopsins to light. Like other visual pigments, red-sensitive rhodopsins may confer some adaptive advantage to those organisms that have them, such as in the detection of flowers, host plants and mates. Unlike the UV-, blue-, or green-sensitive visual pigments found in most arthropods, not all butterflies or insects have evolved red-sensitive pigments perhaps because of some basic constraint or metabolic cost of producing them. The proposed project will involve the characterization of opsin genes from a large number of nymphalid butterflies whose visual pigment absorption spectrum maximum has been measured, and whose taxonomic relationships are already known from independent molecular and morphological data. The data will be used to identify functionally important amino acid substitutions that are responsible for physiological shifts in sensitivity to light. The project will involve international collaborations and provide multi-level integrative training for a postdoctoral and graduate student in vision research, and includes an undergraduate outreach component, whereby undergraduates will be trained in basic molecular biology techniques in the PI's lab. The work will be of interest to workers in behavioral ecology, sensory biology, machine vision and comparative functional genomics.

许多昆虫的眼睛和大脑都有可能具有色觉，即区分不同强度或亮度的光的波长的能力。这是由感光细胞中不同种类的视色素视紫红质分子的表达引起的。蝴蝶的视紫红质对光的敏感度有很大的生理差异。像其他视觉色素一样，红敏感视紫红质可能赋予那些拥有它们的生物一些适应性优势，比如在检测花、寄主植物和配偶方面。与大多数节肢动物中发现的对紫外线、蓝色或绿色敏感的视觉色素不同，并非所有的蝴蝶或昆虫都进化出对红色敏感的色素，这可能是因为产生它们的一些基本限制或代谢成本。该项目将涉及对大量雌雄蛱蝶的视蛋白基因进行表征，这些蛱蝶的视色素吸收光谱最大值已被测量，其分类关系已从独立的分子和形态数据中已知。这些数据将用于识别功能上重要的氨基酸取代，这些氨基酸取代负责对光敏感性的生理变化。该项目将涉及国际合作，为视觉研究方面的博士后和研究生提供多层次的综合培训，并包括本科生拓展部分，本科生将在PI实验室接受基本分子生物学技术的培训。这项工作将对行为生态学、感觉生物学、机器视觉和比较功能基因组学的工作者感兴趣。