Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biotechnologies, Faculty of Nature and Life Sciences, Route de soumaa Blida, Algeria
  • 2 Department of Chemistry and the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
  • 3 BioEasy Sdn Bhd, Setia Alam, Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
  • 4 International Genome Centre, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
  • 5 Division of Genetics and Molecular Biology, Institute of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 6 Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Merchant Venturer's Buliding, Bristol, England
  • 7 Department of Animal Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Animal Sciences Laboratory, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America
  • 8 School of Clinical Sciences, Dorothy Hodgkin Building, University of Bristol, Bristol, England
  • 9 Department of Physiological Sciences, Institute of Biological and Health Sciences, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Seropédica, RJ, Brazil
  • 10 Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 11 Departament de Biomedicina, Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS), Institut de Neurociències, Universitat de Barcelona and Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red sobre Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas (CIBERNED), Barcelona, Spain
  • 12 Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto. SP, Brazil
PLoS One, 2019;14(6):e0216679.
PMID: 31211771 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216679

Abstract

The "ship" of the Arabian and North African deserts, the one-humped dromedary camel (Camelus dromedarius) has a remarkable capacity to survive in conditions of extreme heat without needing to drink water. One of the ways that this is achieved is through the actions of the antidiuretic hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP), which is made in a specialised part of the brain called the hypothalamo-neurohypophyseal system (HNS), but exerts its effects at the level of the kidney to provoke water conservation. Interestingly, our electron microscopy studies have shown that the ultrastructure of the dromedary HNS changes according to season, suggesting that in the arid conditions of summer the HNS is in an activated state, in preparation for the likely prospect of water deprivation. Based on our dromedary genome sequence, we have carried out an RNAseq analysis of the dromedary HNS in summer and winter. Amongst the 171 transcripts found to be significantly differentially regulated (>2 fold change, p value <0.05) there is a significant over-representation of neuropeptide encoding genes, including that encoding AVP, the expression of which appeared to increase in summer. Identification of neuropeptides in the HNS and analysis of neuropeptide profiles in extracts from individual camels using mass spectrometry indicates that overall AVP peptide levels decreased in the HNS during summer compared to winter, perhaps due to increased release during periods of dehydration in the dry season.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.