Abstract
Insects, including those which provide vital ecosystems services as well as those which are devastating pests or disease vectors, locate their resources mainly based on olfaction. Understanding insect olfaction not only from a neurobiological but also from an ecological perspective is therefore crucial to balance insect control and conservation. However, among all sensory stimuli olfaction is particularly hard to grasp. Our chemical environment is made up of thousands of different compounds, which might again be detected by our nose in multiple ways. Due to this complexity, researchers have only recently begun to explore the chemosensory ecology of model organisms such as Drosophila, linking the tools of chemical ecology to those of neurogenetics. This cross-disciplinary approach has enabled several studies that range from single odors and their ecological relevance, via olfactory receptor genes and neuronal processing, up to the insects' behavior. We learned that the insect olfactory system employs strategies of combinatorial coding to process general odors as well as labeled lines for specific compounds that call for an immediate response. These studies opened new doors to the olfactory world in which insects feed, oviposit, and mate.
Highlights
While flying or walking through its natural environment any insect, be it a mosquito, a fly or a giant sphinx moth, encounters a nearly infinite number of chemical signals
Contrary to the visual and auditory systems that basically deal with wavelengths and amplitudes of stimuli along a linear scale, chemical senses detect stimuli, which might vary on dozens of properties, such as chain length, polarity, chirality, and many more
Drosophila for example expresses olfactory receptors (Ors) that are narrowly tuned to sex pheromones, or food and oviposition cues
Summary
While flying or walking through its natural environment any insect, be it a mosquito, a fly or a giant sphinx moth, encounters a nearly infinite number of chemical signals These chemical messages differ widely in the specificity at which they target potential receivers as well as in their signal complexity (Junker et al, 2017). A single compound might be enough for an insect to identify a toxic food source while in other cases an entire blend of compounds might be required to identify a suitable oviposition site These different types of chemical messages, do arise in the way the message is produced by the sender, and by the way these messages are coded on the sensory periphery and in the brain of the receiver. Great progress has been made to decipher the code by which insects read the chemical messages of their environment using neurobiological and ethological methods (Hansson and Stensmyr, 2011)
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