Evolution of Vertebrate Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 3 Channels: Opposite Temperature Sensitivity between Mammals and Western Clawed Frogs

Transient Receptor Potential (TRP) channels serve as temperature receptors in a wide variety of animals and must have played crucial roles in thermal adaptation. The TRP vanilloid (TRPV) subfamily contains several temperature receptors with different temperature sensitivities. The TRPV3 channel is known to be highly expressed in skin, where it is activated by warm temperatures and serves as a sensor to detect ambient temperatures near the body temperature of homeothermic animals such as mammals. Here we performed comprehensive comparative analyses of the TRPV subfamily in order to understand the evolutionary process; we identified novel TRPV genes and also characterized the evolutionary flexibility of TRPV3 during vertebrate evolution. We cloned the TRPV3 channel from the western clawed frog Xenopus tropicalis to understand the functional evolution of the TRPV3 channel. The amino acid sequences of the N- and C-terminal regions of the TRPV3 channel were highly diversified from those of other terrestrial vertebrate TRPV3 channels, although central portions were well conserved. In a heterologous expression system, several mammalian TRPV3 agonists did not activate the TRPV3 channel of the western clawed frog. Moreover, the frog TRPV3 channel did not respond to heat stimuli, instead it was activated by cold temperatures. Temperature thresholds for activation were about 16 °C, slightly below the lower temperature limit for the western clawed frog. Given that the TRPV3 channel is expressed in skin, its likely role is to detect noxious cold temperatures. Thus, the western clawed frog and mammals acquired opposite temperature sensitivity of the TRPV3 channel in order to detect environmental temperatures suitable for their respective species, indicating that temperature receptors can dynamically change properties to adapt to different thermal environments during evolution

The Ankyrin Repeat Domain of the TRPA Protein Painless Is Important for Thermal Nociception but Not Mechanical Nociception

The Drosophila TRPA channel Painless is required for the function of polymodal nociceptors which detect noxious heat and noxious mechanical stimuli. These functions of Painless are reminiscent of mammalian TRPA channels that have also been implicated in thermal and mechanical nociception. A popular hypothesis to explain the mechanosensory functions of certain TRP channels proposes that a string of ankyrin repeats at the amino termini of these channels acts as an intracellular spring that senses force. Here, we describe the identification of two previously unknown Painless protein isoforms which have fewer ankyrin repeats than the canonical Painless protein. We show that one of these Painless isoforms, that essentially lacks ankyrin repeats, is sufficient to rescue mechanical nociception phenotypes of painless mutant animals but does not rescue thermal nociception phenotypes. In contrast, canonical Painless, which contains Ankyrin repeats, is sufficient to largely rescue thermal nociception but is not capable of rescuing mechanical nociception. Thus, we propose that in the case of Painless, ankryin repeats are important for thermal nociception but not for mechanical nociception

Molecular Evolution of the Infrared Sensory Gene TRPA1 in Snakes and Implications for Functional Studies

TRPA1 is a calcium ion channel protein recently identified as the infrared receptor in pit organ-containing snakes. Therefore, understanding the molecular evolution of TRPA1 may help to illuminate the origin of “heat vision” in snakes and reveal the molecular mechanism of infrared sensitivity for TRPA1. To this end, we sequenced the infrared sensory gene TRPA1 in 24 snake species, representing nine snake families and multiple non-snake outgroups. We found that TRPA1 is under strong positive selection in the pit-bearing snakes studied, but not in other non-pit snakes and non-snake vertebrates. As a comparison, TRPV1, a gene closely related to TRPA1, was found to be under strong purifying selection in all the species studied, with no difference in the strength of selection between pit-bearing snakes and non-pit snakes. This finding demonstrates that the adaptive evolution of TRPA1 specifically occurred within the pit-bearing snakes and may be related to the functional modification for detecting infrared radiation. In addition, by comparing the TRPA1 protein sequences, we identified 11 amino acid sites that were diverged in pit-bearing snakes but conserved in non-pit snakes and other vertebrates, 21 sites that were diverged only within pit-vipers but conserved in the remaining snakes. These specific amino acid substitutions may be potentially functional important for infrared sensing

S4-S5 Linker is involved in voltage-dependent gating of human transient receptor potential ankyrin 1 channel

The transient receptor potential ankyrin 1 channel (TRPA1) is a versatile sensory channel that is gated by depolarizing voltages, deep cooling, membrane deformation, and structurally diverse compounds which include proalgesic agents such as allyl isothiocyanate. How these disparate stimuli converge on the channel protein to open the ion-conducting pore has not yet been fully resolved. The overall architecture of TRP channels shows clear similarities to that seen in the well characterized voltage-gated potassium channels. Here, activation of the voltage sensors in the fourth transmembrane segment (S4) is transduced into pore opening via coupling of the S4-S5 linker to the C-terminal S6 segment. In TRPA1, the gain-of-function mutation N855S located in the S4-S5 region has been associated with familial episodic pain syndrome. In an attempt to elucidate the role of the S4-S5 linker and its putative interaction(s) with S6 or the first C-terminal helix in the voltage-dependent gating of TRPA1, we used site-directed mutagenesis, whole-cell electrophysiology, single-channel recording, and molecular dynamics simulations. The charge-reversal mutations K868E and K969E resulted in a decrease in the rectification index compared to wild-type TRPA1 channels, and a virtually voltage-independent conductance-voltage (G-V) relationship. This effect was also observed in the adjacent charge-neutralizing mutant H970A, but was less pronounced in charge- reversal H970D. These results indicate that positively charged residues in the S4-S5 linker and the helix adjacent to the C-terminal S6 segment play a vital role in the voltage-dependent gating of TRPA1

Using CdTe/ZnSe core/shell quantum dots to detect DNA and damage to DNA

Amitava Moulick,1,2 Vedran Milosavljevic,1,2 Jana Vlachova,1,2 Robert Podgajny,3 David Hynek,1,2 Pavel Kopel,1,2 Vojtech Adam1,2 1Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Mendel University, 2Central European Institute of Technology, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czech Republic; 3Faculty of Chemistry, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland Abstract: CdTe/ZnSe core/shell quantum dot (QD), one of the strongest and most highly luminescent nanoparticles, was directly synthesized in an aqueous medium to study its individual interactions with important nucleobases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) in detail. The results obtained from the optical analyses indicated that the interactions of the QDs with different nucleobases were different, which reflected in different fluorescent emission maxima and intensities. The difference in the interaction was found due to the different chemical behavior and different sizes of the formed nanoconjugates. An electrochemical study also confirmed that the purines and pyrimidines show different interactions with the core/shell QDs. Based on these phenomena, a novel QD-based method is developed to detect the presence of the DNA, damage to DNA, and mutation. The QDs were successfully applied very easily to detect any change in the sequence (mutation) of DNA. The QDs also showed their ability to detect DNAs directly from the extracts of human cancer (PC3) and normal (PNT1A) cells (detection limit of 500 pM of DNA), which indicates the possibilities to use this easy assay technique to confirm the presence of living organisms in extreme environments. Keywords: nanoparticles, nucleobases, biosensor, fluorescence, mutatio