, 2000, Mustafa et al., 2007, Mustafa et al., 2010, Pisegna and Wank, 1996 and Spengler et al., 1993). Because of the known involvement SCH 900776 nmr of PACAP and PAC1 in the stress response, we hypothesized that activity-dependent alternative splicing of PAC1, which alters its intracellular signaling mode, may be a unique mechanism for neuronal adaptation to stress. A2BP1 regulates the alternative splicing

of pac1′s exon 14 (dubbed the “hop cassette”), which encodes 28 amino acids of the third intracellular loop of the mouse PAC1 protein ( Lee et al., 2009, Vaudry et al., 2009 and Zhang et al., 2008). We tested whether alternative splicing of the pac1 hop cassette is regulated selleck chemicals by homeostatic challenge. Given that PAC1 is broadly expressed in the zebrafish brain (data not shown), it was difficult to analyze its alternative splicing in the PO of fish. We therefore analyzed whether a stressful challenge induces alternative splicing of PAC1 in the PVN, the major CRH-expressing hypothalamic component of the HPA axis, which can be surgically isolated from the mouse brain. The expression of both isoforms increased during the early stress recovery phase. At the late recovery phase of the stress response, the short pac1 isoform returned to its basal level, whereas long splice isoform,

pac1-hop, was retained at a significantly higher expression level ( Figure 6A). Examining the ratio between the two splice isoforms throughout the recovery period revealed a consistent stress-induced increase

in the long/short ratio, indicating a clear shift in the balance between these isoforms ( Figure 6B). These results suggest that alternative splicing of the hop cassette, an A2BP1 target exon, may be involved in the adaptive response to stress. In view of the above, we examined whether formation of the PAC1-hop mRNA isoform might modulate the animal’s transcriptional response to stressors. To test this hypothesis, we designed two types of antisense morpholino (MO) knockdown reagents (Figure 6C): the first (pac1a-ATG MO) was designed to block expression of all PAC1 isoforms by directing it to PAC1′s translation start site. The second (pac1a-hop MO) was directed to the exon-intron boundary of the because hop encoding exon of the zebrafish pac1a gene. This reagent caused exon skipping of the hop cassette in pac1a, preventing the formation of the long PAC1 isoform without affecting the short variant ( Figure 6C; Figure S5). Complete knockdown of all pac1 isoforms, using pac1a-ATG MO antisense oligonucleotide, led to a marked reduction in the stressor-induced activation of crh transcription ( Figure 6D). This result is in agreement with the importance of PAC1/PACAP pathway for stress-induced crh transcription in vivo and in vitro ( Agarwal et al., 2005, Kageyama et al., 2007 and Stroth and Eiden, 2010).