Dataset Information

Conservation of Olfactory Avoidance in Drosophila Species and Identification of Repellents for Drosophila suzukii.

ABSTRACT: Flying insects use olfaction to navigate towards fruits in complex odor environments with remarkable accuracy. Some fruits change odor profiles substantially during ripening and related species can prefer different stages. In Drosophila species attractive odorants have been studied extensively, but little is understood about the role of avoidance pathways. In order to examine the role of the avoidance cue CO2 emitted from fruit on behavior of two species with different ripening stage preferences, we investigated the CO2-detection pathway in Drosophila melanogaster and Drosophila suzukii, a harmful pest of fruits. Avoidance to CO2 is not conserved in D. suzukii suggesting a behavioral adaptation that could facilitate attraction to younger fruit with higher CO2 emission levels. We investigated known innate avoidance pathways from five species at different evolutionary distances: D. melanogaster, D. yakuba, D. suzukii, D. pseudoobscura and D. virilis. Surprisingly, only DEET shows strong repellency across all species, whereas CO2, citronellal and ethyl 3-hydroxybutyrate show only limited conservation. These findings guide us to test recently discovered safe DEET substitutes, and we identify one that protects fruits from D. suzukii thus providing a new behavioral strategy for controlling agricultural pests.

SUBMITTER: Krause Pham C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4476414 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Conservation of Olfactory Avoidance in Drosophila Species and Identification of Repellents for Drosophila suzukii.

Krause Pham Christine C Ray Anandasankar A

Scientific reports 20150622

Flying insects use olfaction to navigate towards fruits in complex odor environments with remarkable accuracy. Some fruits change odor profiles substantially during ripening and related species can prefer different stages. In Drosophila species attractive odorants have been studied extensively, but little is understood about the role of avoidance pathways. In order to examine the role of the avoidance cue CO2 emitted from fruit on behavior of two species with different ripening stage preferences ...[more]

PMID: 26098542

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Project description:Background The spotted-wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii) is a widespread invasive pest that causes severe economic damage to fruit crops. The early development of D. suzukii is similar to that of other Drosophilids, but the roles of individual genes must be confirmed experimentally. Cellularization genes coordinate the onset of cell division as soon as the invagination of membranes starts around the nuclei in the syncytial blastoderm. The promoters of these genes have been used in genetic pest-control systems to express transgenes that confer embryonic lethality. Such systems could be helpful in sterile insect technique applications to ensure that sterility (bi-sex embryonic lethality) or sexing (female-specific embryonic lethality) can be achieved during mass rearing. The activity of cellularization gene promoters during embryogenesis controls the timing and dose of the lethal gene product. Results Here, we report the isolation of the D. suzukii cellularization genes nullo, serendipity-?, bottleneck and slow-as-molasses from a laboratory strain. Conserved motifs were identified by comparing the encoded proteins with orthologs from other Drosophilids. Expression profiling confirmed that all four are zygotic genes that are strongly expressed at the early blastoderm stage. The 5? flanking regions from these cellularization genes were isolated, incorporated into piggyBac vectors and compared in vitro for the promoter activities. The Dsnullo promoter showed the highest activity in the cell culture assays using D. melanogaster S2 cells. Conclusions The similarities in the gene coding and 5? flanking sequence as well as in the expression pattern of the four cellularization genes between D. melanogaster and D. suzukii, suggest that conserved functions may be involved in both species. The high expression level at the early blastoderm stage of the four cellularization genes were confirmed, thus their promoters can be considered in embryonic lethality systems. While the Dsnullo promoter could be a suitable candidate, all reported promoters here are subject to further in vivo analyses before constructing potential pest control systems. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12863-020-00939-y.

Project description:The lack of a deeper understanding of how olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) encode odors has hindered the progress in understanding the olfactory signal processing in higher brain centers. Here we employ methods of system identification to investigate the encoding of time-varying odor stimuli and their representation for further processing in the spike domain by Drosophila OSNs. In order to apply system identification techniques, we built a novel low-turbulence odor delivery system that allowed us to deliver airborne stimuli in a precise and reproducible fashion. The system provides a 1% tolerance in stimulus reproducibility and an exact control of odor concentration and concentration gradient on a millisecond time scale. Using this novel setup, we recorded and analyzed the in-vivo response of OSNs to a wide range of time-varying odor waveforms. We report for the first time that across trials the response of OR59b OSNs is very precise and reproducible. Further, we empirically show that the response of an OSN depends not only on the concentration, but also on the rate of change of the odor concentration. Moreover, we demonstrate that a two-dimensional (2D) Encoding Manifold in a concentration-concentration gradient space provides a quantitative description of the neuron's response. We then use the white noise system identification methodology to construct one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) Linear-Nonlinear-Poisson (LNP) cascade models of the sensory neuron for a fixed mean odor concentration and fixed contrast. We show that in terms of predicting the intensity rate of the spike train, the 2D LNP model performs on par with the 1D LNP model, with a root mean-square error (RMSE) increase of about 5 to 10%. Surprisingly, we find that for a fixed contrast of the white noise odor waveforms, the nonlinear block of each of the two models changes with the mean input concentration. The shape of the nonlinearities of both the 1D and the 2D LNP model appears to be, for a fixed mean of the odor waveform, independent of the stimulus contrast. This suggests that white noise system identification of Or59b OSNs only depends on the first moment of the odor concentration. Finally, by comparing the 2D Encoding Manifold and the 2D LNP model, we demonstrate that the OSN identification results depend on the particular type of the employed test odor waveforms. This suggests an adaptive neural encoding model for Or59b OSNs that changes its nonlinearity in response to the odor concentration waveforms.

Dataset Information

Conservation of Olfactory Avoidance in Drosophila Species and Identification of Repellents for Drosophila suzukii.

Publications

Conservation of Olfactory Avoidance in Drosophila Species and Identification of Repellents for Drosophila suzukii.

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