Abstract
IN avian pinealocytes, an environmental light signal resets the phase of the endogenous circadian pacemaker that controls the rhythmic production of melatonin1–6. Investigation of the pineal phototransduction pathway should therefore reveal the molecular mechanism of the biological clock. The presence of rhodopsin-Iike photoreceptive pigment4,5 7–9, transducin-like immunoreaction10, and cyclic GMP-dependent cation-channel activity11 in the avian pinealocytes suggests that there is a similarity between retinal rod cells and pinealocytes in the phototransduction pathway. We have now cloned chicken pineal cDNA encoding the photoreceptive molecule, which is 43–48% identical in amino-acid sequence to vertebrate retinal opsins. Pineal opsin, produced by transfection of complementary DNA into cultured cells, was reconstituted with 11-cis-retinal, resulting in formation of a blue-sensitive pigment λmax ≈470 nm). In the light of this functional evidence and because the gene is specifically expressed only in the pineal gland, we con-clude that it is a pineal photosensor and name it pinopsin.
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Okano, T., Yoshizawa, T. & Fukada, Y. Pinopsin is a chicken pineal photoreceptive molecule. Nature 372, 94–97 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1038/372094a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/372094a0
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