Journal
CURRENT BIOLOGY
Volume 22, Issue 6, Pages 538-544Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.01.061
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Funding
- Biomedical Research Council, Singapore
- Temasek Trust
- Singapore National Research Foundation CRP [2007-04]
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The ability to detect and avoid predators is essential to survival. Various animals, from sea urchins to damselfly larvae, use injury of conspecifics to infer the presence of predators [1-7]. In many fish [1, 8, 9], skin damage causes the release of chemicals that elicit escape and fear in members of the shoal. The chemical nature of the alarm substance (Schreckstoff in German) [1], the neural circuits mediating the complex response, and the evolutionary origins of a signal with little obvious benefit to the sender, are unresolved. To address these questions, we use biochemical fractionation to molecularly characterize Schreckstoff. Although hypoxanthine-3 N-oxide has been proposed to be the alarm substance [10, 11], it has not been reliably detected in the skin [12] and there may be other active components [13, 14]. We show that the alarm substance is a mixture that includes the glycosaminoglycan (GAG) chondroitin. Purified chondroitins trigger fear responses. Like skin extract, chondroitins activate the mediodorsal posterior olfactory bulb, a region innervated by crypt neurons [15] that has a unique projection to the habenula [16]. These findings establish GAGs as a new class of odorants in fish, which trigger alarm behavior possibly via a specialized circuit.
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