Bad Taste Protects Fruit Flies from Eating a Toxic Amino Acid in Plants.docVIP

Synopsis BadTasteProtectsFruitFliesfromEatingaToxicAmino AcidinPlants RobinMeadows* FreelanceScienceWriter,Fairfield,California,UnitedStatesofAmerica Besides enhancing the pleasure of that it could still be activated by a moleculehavingaminoacidproperties. Now, Grau and colleagues report that DrosophilarelyonDmXRtotastetheplant toxicant L-canavanine. This comes as a surprise, because all of the other known insecttastereceptorsbelongtoafamilyof gustatory receptors called Grs, which, in fruit flies, includes the caffeine receptor neuronsthatcontainreceptorsforsugars, water,andbittercompounds. To see if L-canavanine activates the eating, our sense of taste can steer us awayfrompoisonousfoods.Manyplants, forexample,producebitter-tastingtoxins, such as caffeine and quinine, to deter predation by herbivores from cows to insects. But it remains a mystery how animals developed their capacity to de- tect—andsoavoid—thetensofthousands of plant toxins, which include alkaloids, phenolics, and nonprotein amino acids. The best-known toxic nonprotein amino acid is L-canavanine, which accumulates in the seeds ofalfalfa (Medicago sativa )and manyotherleguminosae.L-canavanineis so similar to the amino acid L-arginine that it gets incorporated into proteins, DmX receptor, Grau and colleagues expressed the receptor in human embry- onickidney(HEK)cellsandtreatedthem with either L-canavanine or the similar amino acid L-arginine. They found that theformeractivatedthereceptorwhilethe latter did not. To see if DmXR binds L- canavanine, the researchers expressed a mutant of this receptor with an altered bindingsiteinHEKcellsandtreatedthem with L-canavanine. They found that this toxic amino acid failed to activate the mutantDmXR. Gr66a. Grs are seven-transmembrane proteins that are distantly related to the GPCRs family. The researchers tested DmXR for L-canavanine sensitivity, be- cause some other members of the fly familyeatseeds,whichcanberichinthis toxicaminoacid.Incontrast,Drosop