Thank you! :)

Thanks Tyler!

Thank you Eve!

If you’d like to dive in:
👉 Full text and supplemental data: elifesciences.org/articles/970...
👉 Peer reviews are open for transparency.

Feel free to share & comment.

Happy to discuss any aspect of the work.

This project started while I was a postdoc in Dick Nässel lab at Stockholm University. It a was a long journey with multiple setbacks. But grateful to our collaborators at York University, Stockholm University, UNR and colleagues @uni-wuerzburg.de for the support.

Why it matters: Understanding how a neurohormonal circuit bridges environmental stress (e.g., dehydration) with metabolism and renal physiology has broad implications not just for insect neuroendocrinology but for comparative #physiology.

@jayati-gera.bsky.social and @zandawala.bsky.social lab members performed all the imaging and in vivo behavioral and physiological assays.

@tmckim.bsky.social in Biology at UNR performed connectomic analyses to map upstream hygrosensory inputs to ITP neurons.

Omar lab at UNR came in to help during the revisions and showed that ITPa activates Gyc76C in mammalian HEK cells.

Paluzzi lab at York University showed that ITPa inhibits ex vivo fluid secretion by renal tubules via Gyc76C.

We show that ITPa‐producing neurons in the fly brain become activated under dehydration, release ITPa into circulation, and then target renal tubules (kidneys) & fat body (adipose tissue) via Gyc76C to modulate water balance and energy stores.

In this tour-de-force, we use multiple approaches to tackle this. We show that the ITPa neuropeptide binds to a membrane guanylate cyclase receptor, Gyc76C, thereby regulating both osmotic and metabolic homeostasis.

Ion‐transport peptide amidated (ITPa) #neuropeptide is one of the few #Drosophila neuropeptides whose receptor was unknown till now. This anti-diuretic peptide was discovered back in 1992.