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Volume 17, Number 1, Issue of January 1, 1997 pp. 493-499
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience

Nitric Oxide Involvement in Hydra vulgaris Very Primitive Olfactory-Like System

Received June 7, 1996; revised Sept. 23, 1996; accepted Oct. 18, 1996.

Marco Colasanti¹, Giorgio Venturini¹, Angelo Merante¹, Giovanni Musci², and Giuliana M. Lauro¹

¹ Department of Biology, University of Rome 3, 00146 Rome, Italy, and ² Department of Organic and Biological Chemistry, University of Messina, 98166 S. Agata (ME), Italy

Hydra feeding response is a very primitive olfactory-like behavior present in a multicellular organism. We investigated the role of nitric oxide (NO) in the induction and control of hydra feeding response. Under basal conditions, hydra specimens produce detectable amounts of nitrite (NO₂), the breakdown product of NO. When hydra were incubated with reduced glutathione (GSH), the typical activator of feeding response, an increase of basal NO production was observed. This effect was inhibited by glutamic or -aminoadipic acids, two GSH antagonists, which block GSH-induced feeding response, and by the NO synthase (NOS) inhibitor L-NAME. Moreover, we found that hydra possess a calcium-dependent (but calmodulin-independent) NOS isoform. By using exogenous NO donors and NOS inhibitors, we demonstrated that NO stimulus can participate both in triggering tentacular movements and in recruiting neighbor tentacles during hydra feeding response. By using dbt²-cGMP, an analog to cGMP, we observed that the NO effect was independent of cGMP pathway. Our results strongly implicate NO involvement in hydra very primitive feeding behavior, thus confirming its preservation throughout evolution.

Key words: nitric oxide; NO synthase; cyclic GMP; hydra; feeding response; primitive olfactory-like model; chemosensorial system

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