Curcumin Effectively Rescued Parkinson’s Disease-Like Phenotypes in a Novel Drosophila melanogaster Model with dUCH Knockdown

Figure 4

The curcumin treatment recovered locomotor defects from the dopaminergic neuron-specific knockdown of dUCH in larval and adult stages. (a) Images show the motion paths of control (TH > CS), control treated with curcumin (TH > CS + curcumin), dUCH knockdown (TH > dUCH.IR), and dUCH knockdown larvae treated with curcumin (TH > dUCH.IR + curcumin). (b) Quantified data of the crawling assay. Curcumin did not affect the crawling ability of control larvae. dUCH knockdown larvae crawled more slowly than control larvae, while dUCH knockdown larvae fed curcumin showed the recovery of crawling ability (Tukey’s test; and ; ; error bars represent the standard deviation of data). (c) Climbing assay. The knockdown of dUCH in dopaminergic neurons caused a decline in climbing ability; however, dUCH knockdown flies treated with curcumin also showed the strong recovery of climbing ability (two-way ANOVA; and ; population size and technical replication ; error bars indicate the standard error of the mean). TH > CS (w/Y; +; TH-GAL4/+) and TH > dUCH.IR (w/Y; +; TH-GAL4/UAS-dUCH.IR).

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