Abstract
The Aedesaegypti 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.
Highlights
Across animals, males and females of the same species show striking differences in behavior
Our results demonstrate that sexual dimorphism in a single module of a mosquito-specific behavior is controlled by a conserved gene that we speculate has gained a new function in the course of evolution
What is the genetic basis for this extreme sexual dimorphism? We reasoned that fruitless, which is alternatively spliced in a sex-specific manner and promotes male courtship and copulation in D. melanogaster flies (Ito et al, 1996; Ryner et al, 1996), may play similar roles in controlling sexually dimorphic behaviors in Aedes aegypti
Summary
Males and females of the same species show striking differences in behavior. Which genes control sexual dimorphism in specialist species that have evolved novel behaviors? Many advances in understanding the genetics of sexually dimorphic behaviors have come from the study of Drosophila melanogaster fly courtship, where a male fly orients toward, taps, and follows a female fly, extending a wing to produce a courtship song before tasting, mounting, and copulating with her (Hall, 1994). The fruitless gene is sex- spliced in the brain of multiple insect species including mosquitoes (Bertossa et al, 2009; Gailey et al, 2006; Salvemini et al, 2013) and has been proposed to be a master regulator of male courtship and mating behavior across insects
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