View Program - 63rd Annual Drosophila Research Conference

Immunity as well as metabolism are quite old and extensively focused and sort after fields, but their inter-dependency, as Immune- metabolism, is being advocated very recently. This crosstalk infers how under immune compromised state, metabolic shift occurs and metabolites (a-KG, Succinate, Fumarate, etc.) takes on the tasks of proliferation, differentiation and activation of the concerned immune progenitors/cells. Recent work from our lab also highlighted GABA (released from brain) can elicit distinct immune cell population, under wasp infestation, which is nowhere to be seen in homeostasis (Madhwal et. al., 2020). Through our work we would like to switch the conventional paradigm of looking at TCA cycle as just an “intermediary step in the glucose metabolism for energy production” to the “reservoir of cardinal immune metabolites”. Metabolites are well known to get exchanged between the cellular compartments, which brands them competent for being signalling molecules. And what could be the better place for studying metabolites than TCA cycle, which is source as well as sink for all the three macromolecules of life. Conventionally TCA cycle, as the name suggest, always considered to be a cycle, but is it actually a cycle or an important junction of various cycles, so as to facilitate the exchange as well as maintenance of constant concentration of each metabolite. If the later is true, then each of the metabolites generated here can be an independent signalling molecules and directs the heterogeneity of different system. Here with our thorough analysis of TCA cycle, we would like to shed some light onto the crosstalk between the intermediary metabolites, development of blood progenitors and the heterogeneity produced within.

Metabolic regulation of blood progenitor homeostasis and heterogeneity by TCA cycle in development and immune response in Drosophila larvae