MOLECULAR MECHANISM OF COLOR RECEPTION BY LIGHT REGULATED BIOLOGICAL CLOCK FOR REPRODUCTION OF ASCIDIANS

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AbstractAll animals must defend themselves from predation and they have evolved a great variety of morphological and behavioral devices to do so. One of the crypsis is the camouflage which animal resemble their body color to the environment. Octopus shows beautiful play of color and pattern in the skin. These body pattern is a combination of chromatic, textural, postural and locomotion complexes. In order to mach their body color to background, they must recognize the color of the environment. Though there were a lot of arguments, it is concluded that octopus is color blind. In the present works, we proposed octopus recognized environment color by the photoreceptors located at the choromophore of their skin. Retinal proteins in the skin of octopus were successfully visualized and their localization was determined by the time-resolved fluorescence difference imaging method. Next, we examined the localization of retinal protein bearing cells in the octopus skin by immunohistochemistry. We found that polyclonal antibody against octopus rhodopsin was cross-reacted to the 56 kDa protein in the extract of the octopus skin. The immunopositive cells to the polyclonal antibody against octopus rhodopsin cells localized at the peripheral cellular. Absorption spectra of extract of octopus skin by detergents were measured, Absorption maximum shifted to red upon illumination of blue light and absorption maximum recovered to original spectrum when photoproduct was illuminated red light. These results suggest that octopus skin contain rhodopsin like pigments as color photoreceptor.