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The widespread occurrence of melatonin in prokaryotes as well as eukaryotes indicates that this indoleamine is considerably old. This high evolutionary age has led to the development of diverse functions of melatonin in different organisms, such as the detoxification of reactive oxygen species and anti-stress effects. In insects, i.e. Drosophila, the addition of melatonin has also been shown to increase the life span of this arthropod, probably by reducing age-related increasing oxidative stress.
Although the presence of melatonin was recently found to exist in the ecological and toxicological model organism Daphnia, its function in this cladoceran has thus far not been addressed. Therefore, we challenged Daphnia with three different stressors in order to investigate potential stress-response attenuating effects of melatonin. i) Female and male daphnids were exposed to melatonin in a longevity experiment, ii) Daphnia were confronted with stress signals from the invertebrate predator Chaoborus sp., and iii) Daphnia were grown in high densities, i.e. under crowding-stress conditions.
Results
In our experiments we were able to show that longevity of daphnids was not affected by melatonin. Therefore, age-related increasing oxidative stress was probably not compensated by added melatonin. However, melatonin significantly attenuated Daphnia’ s response to acute predator stress, i.e. the formation of neckteeth which decrease the ability of the gape-limited predator Chaoborus sp. to handle their prey. In addition, melatonin decreased the extent of crowding-related production of resting eggs of Daphnia.
Conclusions
Our results confirm the effect of melatonin on inhibition of stress-signal responses of Daphnia. Until now, only a single study demonstrated melatonin effects on behavioral responses due to vertebrate kairomones, whereas we clearly show a more general effect of melatonin: i) on morphological predator defense induced by an invertebrate kairomone and ii) on life history characteristics transmitted by chemical cues from conspecifics. Therefore, we could generally confirm that melatonin plays a role in the attenuation of responses to different stressors in Daphnia.
Leaf senescence is an active process with a pivotal impact on plant productivity. It results from extensive signalling cross-talk coordinating environmental factors with intrinsic age-related mechanisms. Although many studies have shown that leaf senescence is affected by a range of external parameters, knowledge about the regulatory systems that govern the interplay between developmental programmes and environmental stress is still vague. Salinity is one of the most important environmental stresses that promote leaf senescence and thus affect crop yield. Improving salt tolerance by avoiding or delaying senescence under stress will therefore play an important role in maintaining high agricultural productivity. Experimental evidence suggests that hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) functions as a common signalling molecule in both developmental and salt-induced leaf senescence. In this study, microarray-based gene expression profiling on Arabidopsis thaliana plants subjected to long-term salinity stress to induce leaf senescence was performed, together with co-expression network analysis for H2O2-responsive genes that are mutually up-regulated by salt induced-and developmental leaf senescence. Promoter analysis of tightly co-expressed genes led to the identification of seven cis-regulatory motifs, three of which were known previously, namely CACGTGT and AAGTCAA, which are associated with reactive oxygen species (ROS)-responsive genes, and CCGCGT, described as a stress-responsive regulatory motif, while the others, namely ACGCGGT, AGCMGNC, GMCACGT, and TCSTYGACG were not characterized previously. These motifs are proposed to be novel elements involved in the H2O2-mediated control of gene expression during salinity stress-triggered and developmental senescence, acting through upstream transcription factors that bind to these sites.