nubilalisandOstrinia furnacalisresult from the activation of an ancestraldesaturasegene inO

nubilalisandOstrinia furnacalisresult from the activation of an ancestraldesaturasegene inO. the expression in nonneural and in neural cells, SL-327 such that the emission and perception of sex pheromones are precisely coordinated in this species. Keywords:sensory communication, pleiotropy, hydrocarbon, oenocyte The evolution and maintenance of sensory communication in animals is a fundamental biological problem. The genetic control of the signal and its reception must be tightly coadapted, especially in interindividual sexual communication to ensure sexual isolation (13). However, the basic genetic architecture of prezygotic sexual isolation remains largely unexplored in most natural populations (4,5), and there is very SL-327 little empirical evidence for tight genetic linkage between the emission and SL-327 reception of a sensory signal (69). Theoritical prediction and experimental studies assume that the emission/reception coupling depends on the inheritance of separate genes found on the same or on different chromosomes and linked with a high probability (linkage desequilibrium (1014), whereas the single-gene hypothesis seems SL-327 very unlikely (4), as the tissues involved in the emission and perception of sensory signals are usually different (15). Like in many animals,Drosophila melanogasterflies use sex pheromones to detect potential mates and reproduce (16,17). Most of these pheromones include fatty acid-derived hydrocarbons present on the fly cuticle (cuticular hydrocarbons, CHs), which are thought to be mostly perceived by contact with the taste hairs covering the tarsi and proboscis (18,19). InD. melanogaster, CHs differ between the sexes, both for their occurrence and for their behavioral effect on male courtship. SL-327 The predominant CHs of wild-type females tend to increase male intraspecific courtship and mating [7,11 dienes (2022)], whereas the male principal CH reduces male-male courtship [7-tricosene (7-T) (23,24)]. Female and male CHs share a double-bond on carbon 7, which depends ondesat1, a gene coding multiple transcripts, all giving rise to a single desaturase enzyme (25,26). We found a transposablePGal4element inserted in the regulatory region ofdesat1that drastically altered the production and the perception of sex pheromones inD. melanogasterflies (26,27). The defects induced in the two phenotypes could be dissociated following unprecise deletion of Rabbit Polyclonal to Cyclin H (phospho-Thr315) the P-Gal4 sequence (27) and RNA deregulation induced by EP-elements inserted in various putative regulatory regions (9,28). Because the alteration in the two phenotypes was not always coincidental, this finding suggests that thedesat1gene has pleiotropicseparateeffects on pheromonal communication. As very few single genes have been reported to control both the emission and reception of sensory signals [(7); see also the discussion in refs.5and13], we aim at understanding how a single gene can be involved in such different aspects of pheromonal communication. We characterized the molecular structure ofdesat1and its five transcripts and used the five putative regulatory regionseach one corresponding to a different transcriptto build driver transgenes. These drivers were used to target: (i)GFP, to visualize the pattern of tissue expression in male and female flies, and (ii)desat1-RNAi, to measure the consequence ofdesat1down-regulation on pheromone production and perception. == Results == We aimed to find a relationship among the molecular structure, the tissue expression, and the two principal pheromonal phenotypes (production/discrimination) ofdesat1. == Molecular Characterization and Dissection ofdesat1. == We characterized the structure ofdesat1gene in the Canton-S (Cs) wild-type strain and isolated five transcripts, which only diverged for their first noncoding exon (successively:RA,RC,RE,RB,RD) (Fig. 1AandTables S1andS2). The transcription initiation and splicing sites of the first.