Pakeeza and Ogadinma just published a paper in the Journal of Lipid Research. The paper shows that if arachidonic acid (AA) is injected into the fly, it stimulates production of twenty-carbon polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), also known as eicosanoids. They also showed that both linoleic acid (LA) and AA stimulate the fly immune response when D. melanogaster is exposed to a heat-killed bacterial pathogen. This work identifies PUFAs that are involved in insect immunity and adds evidence to the notion that Drosophila utilizes immunostimulatory lipid signaling to mitigate bacterial infections.
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