Dopamine helps worms deal with stress

To maintain protein homoeostasis, animals have developed stress response pathways such as the ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS). Joshi and colleagues have demonstrated that in Caenorhabditis elegans, dopamine release from neurons acts on receptors in the epithelia to modulate protein turnover, by controlling the expression of regulators of the xenobiotic stress response. Dopamine receptor mutants challenged with pathogenic bacteria were defective in protein turnover and were also more sensitive to infection thus highlighting a role for monoamine signalling in innate immunity and stress responses.