SMALL Hsps HELP DROSOPHILA RECOVER FROM CHILL COMA

摘要

Large warm bodied animals hardly notice thermal fluctuations, but for tiny insects they can be life threatening. If temperatures drop below 7°C, Drosophila melanogaster slip into a coma due to malfunctions at the neuromuscular level. Hervé Colinet, Siu Fai Lee and Ary Hoffmann from the University of Melbourne, Australia, explain that stricken insects can recover from these drastic symptoms, thanks to a suite of proteins known as small heat shock proteins (sHsps). However, it wasn't clear how these proteins aided recovery. As genes first have to be transcribed into mRNA before the mRNA is translated into proteins, Colinet and his colleagues decided to knock down mRNA production (reduce transcription) of two sHsp genes, Hsp22 and Hsp23, to see how losing them affected D. melanogaster recovering from chill coma (p. 4146).