Researchers at Nagoya University and others have announced that they have discovered a mechanism that causes depression-like behavior in winter and a drug that improves it in research using medaka.First, researchers who have shown through experiments that winter medaka is less social and more anxious than summer medaka are changing in the brains of winter medaka and summer medaka. The molecule was examined.As a result, the amount of metabolites known to be related to depression, the expression level of "clock genes" that control the biological clock, the expression level of inflammation-related genes, etc. fluctuate greatly between winter and summer. I found that I was there.

　Therefore, we aim to elucidate the mechanism of winter depression by searching for existing drugs that improve the social decline of medaka in winter from the "chemical genomics" approach that combines screening of existing drug libraries and genome function analysis. rice field. After three years of screening, it was found that the active ingredient Celastrol contained in traditional Chinese medicine improves the sociality of medaka in winter.

　So far, the effect of Celastrol on the central nervous system has not been known.Since Celastrol has the effect of activating the "NRF2 antioxidant pathway" in the brain, researchers investigated the expression of the NRF2 gene in medaka and found that it plays an important role in the development of depression. The expression was observed in.It was also found that medaka, which prevented NRF2 from working with genome editing technology, was less social.

　In recent years, fish have been attracting attention as a model animal for mental illness.The results of this research using medaka are also expected to contribute to the understanding of human winter depression and drug discovery.

Paper information:[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA] easy onal changes in NRF2 antioxidant pathway regulates winter depression-like behavior