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Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor
The Aedes aegypti mosquito shows extreme sexual dimorphism in feeding. Only females are attracted to and obtain a blood-meal from humans, which they use to stimulate egg production. The fruitless gene is sex-specifically spliced and encodes a BTB zinc-finger transcription factor proposed to be a mas...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7806257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33284111 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63982 |
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author | Basrur, Nipun S De Obaldia, Maria Elena Morita, Takeshi Herre, Margaret von Heynitz, Ricarda K Tsitohay, Yael N Vosshall, Leslie B |
author_facet | Basrur, Nipun S De Obaldia, Maria Elena Morita, Takeshi Herre, Margaret von Heynitz, Ricarda K Tsitohay, Yael N Vosshall, Leslie B |
author_sort | Basrur, Nipun S |
collection | PubMed |
description | The Aedes aegypti mosquito shows extreme sexual dimorphism in feeding. Only females are attracted to and obtain a blood-meal from humans, which they use to stimulate egg production. The fruitless gene is sex-specifically spliced and encodes a BTB zinc-finger transcription factor proposed to be a master regulator of male courtship and mating behavior across insects. We generated fruitless mutant mosquitoes and showed that males failed to mate, confirming the ancestral function of this gene in male sexual behavior. Remarkably, fruitless males also gain strong attraction to a live human host, a behavior that wild-type males never display, suggesting that male mosquitoes possess the central or peripheral neural circuits required to host-seek and that removing fruitless reveals this latent behavior in males. Our results highlight an unexpected repurposing of a master regulator of male-specific sexual behavior to control one module of female-specific blood-feeding behavior in a deadly vector of infectious diseases. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7806257 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78062572021-01-15 Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor Basrur, Nipun S De Obaldia, Maria Elena Morita, Takeshi Herre, Margaret von Heynitz, Ricarda K Tsitohay, Yael N Vosshall, Leslie B eLife Genetics and Genomics The Aedes aegypti mosquito shows extreme sexual dimorphism in feeding. Only females are attracted to and obtain a blood-meal from humans, which they use to stimulate egg production. The fruitless gene is sex-specifically spliced and encodes a BTB zinc-finger transcription factor proposed to be a master regulator of male courtship and mating behavior across insects. We generated fruitless mutant mosquitoes and showed that males failed to mate, confirming the ancestral function of this gene in male sexual behavior. Remarkably, fruitless males also gain strong attraction to a live human host, a behavior that wild-type males never display, suggesting that male mosquitoes possess the central or peripheral neural circuits required to host-seek and that removing fruitless reveals this latent behavior in males. Our results highlight an unexpected repurposing of a master regulator of male-specific sexual behavior to control one module of female-specific blood-feeding behavior in a deadly vector of infectious diseases. eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd 2020-12-07 /pmc/articles/PMC7806257/ /pubmed/33284111 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63982 Text en © 2020, Basrur et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Genetics and Genomics Basrur, Nipun S De Obaldia, Maria Elena Morita, Takeshi Herre, Margaret von Heynitz, Ricarda K Tsitohay, Yael N Vosshall, Leslie B Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title | Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title_full | Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title_fullStr | Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title_full_unstemmed | Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title_short | Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
title_sort | fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor |
topic | Genetics and Genomics |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7806257/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33284111 http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63982 |
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