Biochemistry and Endocrine Regulation of Sex Pheromone Production in the Housefly and German Cockroach

Abstract

There has been a dramatic increase of interest in the biosynthesis of insect sex pheromones over the last decade (Prestwich and Blomquist, 1987). It now appears that many of the rather novel compounds that are components of insect sex pheromones are produced by the addition of a few ancillary enzymes to those of “normal” metabolism. For example, the carbon skeletons of many lepidopteran sex pheromones are produced from common fatty acids by a novel delta-ll desaturase and highly specific chain-shortening reactions (Bjostad et al., 1987). In the Coleoptera, sex pheromones are often produced by the use of one or two highly specific enzymes that convert dietary material, usually isopreniod, to active pheromones (Vanderwel and Oehlschlager, 1987). By using one or a few ancillary enzymes to alter the products of the usual lipid metabolic pathways or to alter dietary constituents, the insect requires much less genetic material than would be necessary to code for a complete set of enzymes that would be expressed only in the pheromone-producing tissue. This phenomenon appears to exist in the housefly, Musca domestica, and the German cockroach, Blattella germanica, as hormone control of several enzymes could account for alteration of the products of cuticular lipid biosynthesis to produce the female-specific sex pheromone components.