Delineating purinergic signaling in Drosophila

Simplistic models can aid to discover what's important in the context of normal and pathological behavior. First recognized as a genetic model more than 100 years ago, to date fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) still remain an astonishingly good laboratory stand-in for scientists to study development, physiology, and to investigate molecular mechanisms of human diseases. This is because fruit flies indeed represent a simplistic model. Furthermore, about 75% of human disease-related genes have their counterparts in the Drosophila genome, added to the fact that fruit flies require an inexpensive and extremely easy maintenance effort, being invertebrates and moreover lacking any ethical concern issue. Purinergic signaling is by definition mediated by extracellular purinergic ligands, among which ATP represents the prototype molecule. A key feature that has progressively emerged when dissecting the purinergic mechanisms, is the multilayer and dynamic nature of the signaling sustained by purinergic ligands. Indeed, these last are sequentially metabolized by several different ectonucleotidases, which generate the ligands that simultaneously activate several different purinergic receptors. Because significant purinergic actions have been described also in Drosophila, the aim of the present work is to provide a comprehensive picture of the purinergic events occurring in fruit flies.