Affiliation:
1. Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University, New York, United States
2. Kavli Neural Systems Institute, New York, United States
3. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York, United States
Abstract
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.
Funder
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
Harvey L Karp Discovery Award
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
Helen Hay Whitney Foundation
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
National Institute of General Medical Sciences
Quadrivium Foundation
Publisher
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subject
General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine,General Neuroscience
Cited by
37 articles.
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