Publications by authors named "R Benton"
Article Synopsis
- Chemogenetics involves using specially engineered proteins to control cell activity, especially in neurons, by responding to small molecules.
- G protein-coupled receptor-based DREADDs are popular in this field, but there's growing interest in ion channel tools that directly change neuron activity.
- This text focuses on a new technology called "IR-mediated neuronal activation" (IRNA), which utilizes insect Ionotropic Receptors (IRs) to create distinct neuronal responses to specific chemicals, with potential for customizing different brain cell activations.
Many organisms, including cosmopolitan drosophilids, show circadian plasticity, varying their activity with changing dawn-dusk intervals. How this behaviour evolves is unclear. Here we compare Drosophila melanogaster with Drosophila sechellia, an equatorial, ecological specialist that experiences minimal photoperiod variation, to investigate the mechanistic basis of circadian plasticity evolution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial targeting of the NEIL1 DNA glycosylase to the mitochondria.
Environ Mol Mutagen
October 2024
The human NEIL1 DNA glycosylase is one of 11 mammalian glycosylases that initiate base excision repair. While substrate preference, catalytic mechanism, and structural information of NEIL1's ordered residues are available, limited information on its subcellular localization, compounded by relatively low endogenous expression levels, have impeded our understanding of NEIL1. Here, we employed a previously developed computational framework to optimize the mitochondrial localization signal of NEIL1, enabling the visualization of its specific targeting to the mitochondrion via confocal microscopy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study examines how the Drosophila sechellia, a fruit-fly species that specializes in Morinda citrifolia (noni fruit), has evolved to have more olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) compared to its relative, D. melanogaster.
- Researchers found that the increase in OSNs enhances the ability to track noni odors more effectively, despite not improving the sensitivity of the projection neurons corresponding to those OSNs.
- The findings suggest that while more sensory neurons can help in odor detection, they actually lead to reduced adaptation of projection neurons, indicating a complex relationship between neuron quantity and sensory processing.
Brain evolution has primarily been studied at the macroscopic level by comparing the relative size of homologous brain centers between species. How neuronal circuits change at the cellular level over evolutionary time remains largely unanswered. Here, using a phylogenetically informed framework, we compare the olfactory circuits of three closely related Drosophila species that differ in their chemical ecology: the generalists Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila simulans and Drosophila sechellia that specializes on ripe noni fruit.
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