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Evolutionary biology

Eyes viewed from the skin

Nature volume 391, pages 632–633 (1998)Cite this article

Many vertebrates and invertebrates have cells in the skin which react to light by dispersing or aggregating intracellular pigment granules. Even in a dish, such cells act like chameleons and change their shading according to the light1.

A study by Provencio et al., published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences2, now shows that light-sensitive pigment cells in frog skin, called melanophores, express a molecule, melanopsin, which is similar to the rhodopsins used to detect light in the eye. Melanopsin is also expressed in several other cell types known or thought to be light-sensitive in the frog, including cells in the iris, non-image-forming photoreceptor cells in the retina, and hypothalamic neurons which may be involved in controlling responses to day/night cycles. All this is hardly unexpected. Rather, the real surprise comes in Provencio and colleagues' finding that melanopsin is more closely related to the rhodopsins in invertebrate eyes (particularly of scallop, squid and octopus) than to those in vertebrate eyes, including the frog's own eyes. This is an observation that raises several intriguing issues.

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Figure 1: Opsins are seven-transmembrane G-protein-coupled receptors, and the main features of melanopsin, the form newly discovered2 in the frog, are shown here.
Figure 2: Two possible evolutionary explanations of the finding by Provencio et al.2 that vertebrate melanophores express an invertebrate-type opsin.

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  1. Heinz Arnheiter is in the Laboratory of Developmental Neurogenetics, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Building 36, Room 5D06, 36 Convent Drive, Bethesda, 20892-4160, Maryland, USA

    Heinz Arnheiter

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  1. Heinz Arnheiter
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Arnheiter, H. Eyes viewed from the skin. Nature 391, 632–633 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/35487

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