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Pre-imaginal conditioning alters adult sex pheromone response in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: Pheromones are chemical signals that induce innate responses in individuals of the same species that may vary with physiological and developmental state. In Drosophila melanogaster, the most intensively studied pheromone is 11-cis-vaccenyl acetate (cVA), which is synthezised in the male ejaculatory bulb and is transferred to the female during copulation. Among other effects, cVA inhibits male courtship of mated females. We found that male courtship inhibition depends on the amount of cVA and this effect is reduced in male flies derived from eggs covered with low to zero levels of cVA. This effect is not observed if the eggs are washed, or if the eggs are laid several days after copulation. This suggests that courtship suppression involves a form of pre-imaginal conditioning, which we show occurs during the early larval stage. The conditioning effect could not be rescued by synthetic cVA, indicating that it largely depends on conditioning by cVA and other maternally-transmitted factor(s). These experiments suggest that one of the primary behavioral effects of cVA is more plastic and less stereotypical than had hitherto been realised.

SUBMITTER: Everaerts C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6164551 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Pre-imaginal conditioning alters adult sex pheromone response in Drosophila.

Everaerts Claude C Cazalé-Debat Laurie L Louis Alexis A Pereira Emilie E Farine Jean-Pierre JP Cobb Matthew M Ferveur Jean-François JF

PeerJ 20180927

Pheromones are chemical signals that induce innate responses in individuals of the same species that may vary with physiological and developmental state. In Drosophila melanogaster, the most intensively studied pheromone is 11-cis-vaccenyl acetate (cVA), which is synthezised in the male ejaculatory bulb and is transferred to the female during copulation. Among other effects, cVA inhibits male courtship of mated females. We found that male courtship inhibition depends on the amount ...[more]

PMID: 30280017

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Project description:BackgroundCircadian clocks have been implicated in the regulation of pre-adult development of fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster. It is believed that faster clocks speed up development and slower clocks slow it down. We established three sets of D. melanogaster populations (early, control and late). The early and late populations were raised by selecting for flies that emerged either in the morning or in the evening under 12:12 hr light/dark (LD) cycles. After 75 generations of selection, the time course and waveform of the adult emergence and activity rhythms of the early and the late populations diverged from each other as well as from the controls. In this paper, we report the consequence of this selection on the rate of pre-adult development.ResultsWe assayed the pre-adult development time of the selected and control populations under 12:12 hr LD cycles and constant darkness (DD). Under LD cycles, the early populations develop faster than the controls, while the late populations develop slower than the controls. Although flies take longer to develop under DD than in LD, the relative differences between the mean development times of the selected and control populations remain unaltered in DD. In a separate experiment designed to investigate the effect of time of egg collection and experimental conditions on the duration of pre-adult stage, we assayed the development time of the selected and control populations by collecting eggs at different times of the day (morning and evening) and by assaying their pre-adult development time under constant light (LL), LD, and DD conditions. Irrespective of the time of egg collection and assay light regime, the late flies continue to develop slower than the early flies.ConclusionThe results of our study clearly indicate that selection on the timing of adult emergence alters the rate of pre-adult development in D. melanogaster. The timing of egg collection as well as assay light regime does not have any measurable effect on the relative differences between the developmental rates of the early and the late flies. Taken together these results appear to suggest that pleiotropic effects of clock genes mediate correlated changes in the timing of adult emergence and the rate of pre-adult development in D. melanogaster.

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Pre-imaginal conditioning alters adult sex pheromone response in Drosophila.

Publications

Pre-imaginal conditioning alters adult sex pheromone response in <i>Drosophila</i>.

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