Abstract
Courtship behaviours allow animals to interact and display their qualities before committing to reproduction. In fly courtship, the female decides whether or not to mate and is thought to display receptivity by slowing down to accept the male. Very little is known on the neuronal brain circuitry controlling female receptivity. Here we use genetic manipulation and behavioural studies to identify a novel set of neurons in the brain that controls sexual receptivity in the female without triggering the postmating response. We show that these neurons, defined by the expression of the transcription factor apterous, affect the modulation of female walking speed during courtship. Interestingly, we found that the apterous neurons required for female receptivity are neither doublesex nor fruitless positive suggesting that apterous neurons are not specified by the sex-determination cascade. Overall, these findings identify a neuronal substrate underlying female response to courtship and highlight the central role of walking speed in the receptivity behaviour.
Highlights
During courtship, typically the male does the displays and the female decides whether or not to mate[1]
In the olfactory system cisVaccenyl acetate (cVA) is detected through sensory neurons that express the odorant receptor Or67d28. cVA information is transferred to the lateral horn where it is processed by sexually dimorphic neurons that express the transcription factor fruitless[29,30,31]
As a first approach to identify neurons involved in female receptivity behaviour, we wondered if apterous-positive neurons could play a role in female sexual behaviours
Summary
Typically the male does the displays and the female decides whether or not to mate[1]. A virgin female may walk away until she eventually stops and accepts the male[4,5] She displays a few behavioural elements that may be interpreted as mild rejection responses such as wing fluttering, ovipositor extrusion, decamping, fending, kicking, abdominal preening and droplet emission[4,6,7,8]. Lays an order of magnitude more eggs and even changes her nutrient preference[12,13,14,15] This change in behaviour is called postmating switch and is triggered by the sex-peptide, which is transferred from the male to the female during copulation[16,17,18]. Spinster mutant mosaics revealed that loss of spinster function in VA1v olfactory projection neurons leads to receptivity reduction[32]
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