Physiological mechanism of heat stress in Drosophila:A review

Influenced by global greenhouse and urban heat island effect,high temperature environment becomes in-creasingly harmful to human health,which makes the study about physiological mechanism of heat stress in living crea-ture gradually become a research hotspot. Drosophila becomes the best model species for heat stress study due to its sensi-bility to temperature,simple neuron structure and genetic stability. The research process of thermal sensation processing, temperature preference and thermo tolerance based on Drosophila were reviewed in this paper. The advantages of using Drosophila to study the process of thermal perception,warm receptors responding to innocuous warming and high tempera-ture nociceptors to noxious heat were stated,and temperature preference of Drosophila with its possible influencing fac-tors were pointed out. The induced expression,expression amount and temperature threshold of heat shock proteins in Drosophila were discussed,and the variation of gene structure,effects of functional plants and nutrients on its heat resis-tance were illustrated in the paper. In the future,the thermal perception mechanism of Drosophila can be further explored in thermoregulation,the effect of food on biological thermal preference and influences of functional plants and nutrients on thermotolerance of Drosophila at the molecular level in order to find out the method of adjusting the optimum human body temperature through food and more reasonable preventive measures of heat injury.