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Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless

The fruitless (fru) gene of Drosophila melanogaster generates two groups of protein products, the male-specific FruM proteins and non-sex-specific FruCOM proteins. The FruM proteins have a 101 amino acids (a.a.)-long extension at the N-terminus which is absent from FruCOM. We suggest that this N-ter...

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Autores principales: Sato, Kosei, Goto, Junpei, Yamamoto, Daisuke
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813181/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31680899
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00245
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author Sato, Kosei
Goto, Junpei
Yamamoto, Daisuke
author_facet Sato, Kosei
Goto, Junpei
Yamamoto, Daisuke
author_sort Sato, Kosei
collection PubMed
description The fruitless (fru) gene of Drosophila melanogaster generates two groups of protein products, the male-specific FruM proteins and non-sex-specific FruCOM proteins. The FruM proteins have a 101 amino acids (a.a.)-long extension at the N-terminus which is absent from FruCOM. We suggest that this N-terminal extension might confer male-specific roles on FruM interaction partner proteins such as Lola, which otherwise operates as a transcription factor common to both sexes. FruM-expressing neurons are known to connect with other neurons to form a sexually dimorphic circuit for male mating behavior. We propose that FruM proteins expressed in two synaptic partners specify, at the transcriptional level, signaling pathways through which select pre- and post-synaptic partners communicate, and thereby pleiotropic ligand-receptor pairs for cell-cell interactions acquire the high specificity for mutual connections between two FruM-positive cells. We further discuss the possibility that synaptic connections made by FruM-positive neurons are regulated by neural activities, which in turn upregulate Fru expression in active cells, resulting in feedforward enhancement of courtship activities of the male fly.
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spelling pubmed-68131812019-11-01 Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless Sato, Kosei Goto, Junpei Yamamoto, Daisuke Front Behav Neurosci Behavioral Neuroscience The fruitless (fru) gene of Drosophila melanogaster generates two groups of protein products, the male-specific FruM proteins and non-sex-specific FruCOM proteins. The FruM proteins have a 101 amino acids (a.a.)-long extension at the N-terminus which is absent from FruCOM. We suggest that this N-terminal extension might confer male-specific roles on FruM interaction partner proteins such as Lola, which otherwise operates as a transcription factor common to both sexes. FruM-expressing neurons are known to connect with other neurons to form a sexually dimorphic circuit for male mating behavior. We propose that FruM proteins expressed in two synaptic partners specify, at the transcriptional level, signaling pathways through which select pre- and post-synaptic partners communicate, and thereby pleiotropic ligand-receptor pairs for cell-cell interactions acquire the high specificity for mutual connections between two FruM-positive cells. We further discuss the possibility that synaptic connections made by FruM-positive neurons are regulated by neural activities, which in turn upregulate Fru expression in active cells, resulting in feedforward enhancement of courtship activities of the male fly. Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-10-18 /pmc/articles/PMC6813181/ /pubmed/31680899 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00245 Text en Copyright © 2019 Sato, Goto and Yamamoto. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Behavioral Neuroscience
Sato, Kosei
Goto, Junpei
Yamamoto, Daisuke
Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title_full Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title_fullStr Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title_full_unstemmed Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title_short Sex Mysteries of the Fly Courtship Master Regulator Fruitless
title_sort sex mysteries of the fly courtship master regulator fruitless
topic Behavioral Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813181/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31680899
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00245
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