A gene-expression-based neural code for food abundance that modulates lifespan

How the nervous system internally represents environmental food availability is poorly understood. Here, we show that quantitative information about food abundance is encoded by combinatorial neuron-specific gene-expression of conserved TGFβ and serotonin pathway components in Caenorhabditis elegans. Crosstalk and auto-regulation between these pathways alters the shape, dynamic range, and population variance of the gene-expression responses of daf-7 (TGFβ) and tph-1 (tryptophan hydroxylase) to food availability. These intricate regulatory features provide distinct mechanisms for TGFβ and serotonin signaling to tune the accuracy of this multi-neuron code: daf-7 primarily regulates gene-expression variability, while tph-1 primarily regulates the dynamic range of gene-expression responses. This code is functional because daf-7 and tph-1 mutations bidirectionally attenuate food level-dependent changes in lifespan. Our results reveal a neural code for food abundance and demonstrate that gene expression serves as an additional layer of information processing in the nervous system to control long-term physiology. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06259.001

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  eLife

• Publication date

  2015-04-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.7554/eLife.06259PMID 25962853PMCID 4417936
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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