Journal
PIGMENT CELL & MELANOMA RESEARCH
Volume 31, Issue 3, Pages 354-373Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/pcmr.12678
Keywords
alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone; intrinsically photosensitive horizontal cell; intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell; melanosome; melatonin
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Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
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Melanopsin photopigments, Opn4x and Opn4m, were evolutionary selected to see the light in systems that regulate skin colour change. In this review, we analyse the roles of melanopsins, and how critical evolutionary developments, including the requirement for thermoregulation and ultraviolet protection, the emergence of a background adaptation mechanism in land-dwelling amphibian ancestors and the loss of a photosensitive pineal gland in mammals, may have helped sculpt the mechanisms that regulate light-controlled skin pigmentation. These mechanisms include melanopsin in skin pigment cells directly inducing skin darkening for thermoregulation/ultraviolet protection; melanopsin-expressing eye cells controlling neuroendocrine circuits to mediate background adaptation in amphibians in response to surface-reflected light; and pineal gland secretion of melatonin phased to environmental illuminance to regulate circadian and seasonal variation in skin colour, a process initiated by melanopsin-expressing eye cells in mammals, and by as yet unknown non-visual opsins in the pineal gland of non-mammals.
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