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Drosophila Vision Depends on Carcinine Uptake by an Organic Cation Transporter

Chaturvedi, Ratna
Luan, Zhuo
Guo, Peiyi
Li, Hong-Sheng
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Abstract

Recycling of neurotransmitters is essential for sustained neuronal signaling, yet recycling pathways for various transmitters, including histamine, remain poorly understood. In the first visual ganglion (lamina) of Drosophila, photoreceptor-released histamine is taken up into perisynaptic glia, converted to carcinine, and delivered back to the photoreceptor for histamine regeneration. Here, we identify an organic cation transporter, CarT (carcinine transporter), that transports carcinine into photoreceptors during histamine recycling. CarT mediated in vitro uptake of carcinine. Deletion of the CarT gene caused an accumulation of carcinine in laminar glia accompanied by a reduction in histamine, resulting in abolished photoreceptor signal transmission and blindness in behavioral assays. These defects were rescued by expression of CarT cDNA in photoreceptors, and they were reproduced by photoreceptor-specific CarT knockdown. Our findings suggest a common role for the conserved family of CarT-like transporters in maintaining histamine homeostasis in both mammalian and fly brains.

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Cell Rep. 2016 Mar 8;14(9):2076-83. doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2016.02.009. Epub 2016 Feb 25. Link to article on publisher's site

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10.1016/j.celrep.2016.02.009
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26923590
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Notes

Co-author Peiyi Guo is a doctoral student in the Neuroscience Program in the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) at UMass Medical School.

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<p>This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).</p>