fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor
- The Rockefeller University, 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.
Data availability
All raw data are provided in Data File 1. Plasmids are available at Addgene (#141099, #141100). RNA-seq data are available in the Short Read Archive at Genbank (Bioproject: PRJNA612100). Details of Quattroport fabrication and operation are available at Github: https://github.com/VosshallLab/Basrur_Vosshall2020
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Sex-specific mosquito brain transcriptomesNCBI SRA Bioproject: PRJNA612100.
Article and author information
Author details
Maria Elena De Obaldia
Ricarda K von Heynitz
Funding
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Vosshall-Investigator)
- Leslie B Vosshall
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1 TR000043)
- Leslie B Vosshall
Harvey L. Karp Discovery Award (postdoctoral fellowship)
- Maria Elena De Obaldia
- Takeshi Morita
Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS Overseas Research Fellowship)
- Takeshi Morita
Helen Hay Whitney Foundation (HHW Fellowship)
- Maria Elena De Obaldia
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1 TR001866)
- Maria Elena De Obaldia
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (F30DC017658)
- Margaret Herre
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM007739)
- Margaret Herre
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Blood-feeding procedures with live mice were approved and monitored by The Rockefeller University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC protocol 17018) .
Human subjects: Blood-feeding procedures and behavioral experiments with human volunteers were approved and monitored by The Rockefeller University Institutional Review Board (IRB protocol LV-0652). Human subjects gave their written informed consent to participate.
Copyright
© 2020, Basrur et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor
eLife 9:e63982.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63982
