Accumulated research has demonstrated the beneficial effects of dietary restriction on extending lifespan and increasing cellular stress resistance. However, reducing nutrient intake has also been shown to direct animal behaviors toward food acquisition. Under food-limiting conditions, behavioral changes suggest that neuronal and
muscle activities in circuits that are not involved in nutrient acquisition are down-regulated. These dietary-regulated mechanisms, if understood better, might provide an approach to compensate for defects in molecules that regulate cell excitability. We previously reported that a neuromuscular circuit used in Caenorhabditis elegans male mating behavior is attenuated under food-limiting conditions. During periods between matings, sex-specific muscles that control movements of the male''s copulatory spicules are kept inactive by UNC-103 ether-a-go-gorelated gene (ERG)like K channels. Deletion of unc-103 causes 3040 of virgin
males to display sex-muscle seizures; however, when food is deprived from males, the incidence of spontaneous muscle contractions drops to 911. In this work, we used
genetics and pharmacology to address the
mechanisms that act parallel with UNC-103 to suppress muscle
seizures in males that lack ERG-like K channel function. We identify calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II as a regulator that uses different mechanisms in food and nonfood conditions to compensate for reduced ERG-like K channel activity. We found that in food-deprived conditions, calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II acts cell-autonomously with ether-a-go-go K
channels to inhibit spontaneous muscle contractions. Our work suggests that upregulating mechanisms used by food deprivation can suppress muscle seizures.
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