The steroid-hormone ecdysone coordinates parallel pupariation neuromotor and morphogenetic subprograms via epidermis-to-neuron Dilp8-Lgr3 signal induction

Funding Information: We thank Drs. Carlos Ribeiro, Christen Mirth, Elio Sucena, Filip Port, Frank Schnorrer, Julien Colombani, Maria Dominguez, Maria Luisa Vasconcelos, Pierre Leopold, Simon Bullock, Rita Teodoro, Gerald Rubin, Melissa Harrison, Kate O’Connor-Giles, Jill Wildonger, Mariana Melani, Pablo Wappner, and Christian Wegener for fly stocks and reagents. We thank Ryohei Yagi and Konrad Basler for the LHV2 plasmid and Brain McCabe for the mhc-Gateway destination plasmid. We thank Carlos Ribeiro and Dennis Goldschmidt for help in designing and constructing one of the pupariation arenas and Mariana Melani, Pablo Wappner, Arash Bashirullah, and Filip Port for sharing resources and unpublished data. We thank Arash Bashirullah, Fillip Port, and Carlos Ribeiro for discussions and/or comments on the manuscript, and Jim Truman for discussions on Fraenkel’s pupariation factors. Stocks obtained from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (NIH P40OD018537) were used in this study. Work in the Integrative Biomedicine Laboratory was supported by the European Commission FP7 (PCIG13-GA-2013-618847), by the FCT (IF/00022/2012; Congento LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-022170, cofinanced by FCT/Lisboa2020; UID/Multi/04462/2019; PTDC/BEXBCM/1370/2014; PTDC/MED-NEU/30753/2017; PTDC/BIA-BID/31071/2017; FCT SFRH/BPD/94112/ 2013; SFRH/BD/94931/2013), the MIT Portugal Program (MIT-EXPL/BIO/0097/2017), and FAPESP (16/09659-3, 16/10342-4, and 17/17904-0). AG is a CONICET researcher, YV holds a CONICET postdoctoral fellowship and FPS and MJD hold a PhD fellowship from CONICET. Work in the Garelli lab was supported by ANPCyT (Agencia Nacional para la Promoción de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, PICT 2014-2900 and PICT 2017-0254) and CONICET (PIP11220150100182CO). Publisher Copyright: © 2021, The Author(s). Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Innate behaviors consist of a succession of genetically-hardwired motor and physiological subprograms that can be coupled to drastic morphogenetic changes. How these integrative responses are orchestrated is not completely understood. Here, we provide insight into these mechanisms by studying pupariation, a multi-step innate behavior of Drosophila larvae that is critical for survival during metamorphosis. We find that the steroid-hormone ecdysone triggers parallel pupariation neuromotor and morphogenetic subprograms, which include the induction of the relaxin-peptide hormone, Dilp8, in the epidermis. Dilp8 acts on six Lgr3-positive thoracic interneurons to couple both subprograms in time and to instruct neuromotor subprogram switching during behavior. Our work reveals that interorgan feedback gates progression between subunits of an innate behavior and points to an ancestral neuromodulatory function of relaxin signaling.publishersversionpublishe