| Title: | How flies respond to honey bee pheromone: the role of the foraging gene on reproductive response to queen mandibular pheromone |
| Author(s): | Camiletti AL; Awde DN; Thompson GJ; |
| Address: | "Biology Department, Western University, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada, acamilet@uwo.ca" |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00114-013-1125-3 |
| ISSN/ISBN: | 1432-1904 (Electronic) 0028-1042 (Linking) |
| Abstract: | "In this study we test one central prediction from sociogenomic theory--that social and non-social taxa share common genetic toolkits that regulate reproduction in response to environmental cues. We exposed Drosophila females of rover (for(R)) and sitter (for(s)) genotypes to an ovary-suppressing pheromone derived from the honeybee Apis mellifera. Surprisingly, queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) affected several measures of fitness in flies, and in a manner comparable to the pheromone's normal effect on bee workers. QMP-treated sitter flies had smaller ovaries that contained fewer eggs than did untreated controls. QMP-treated rover flies, by contrast, showed a more variable pattern that only sometimes resulted in ovary inhibition, while a third strain of fly that contains a sitter mutant allele in a rover background (for(s2)) showed no ovarian response to QMP. Taken together, our results suggest that distinctly non-social insects have some capacity to respond to social cues, but that this response varies with fly genotype. In general, the interspecific response is consistent with a conserved gene set affecting reproductive physiology. The differential response among strains in particular suggests that for is itself important for modulating the fly's pheromonal response" |
| Keywords: | Animals Bees/*chemistry Drosophila/*drug effects/genetics Female Genotype Mutation Ovary/drug effects Pheromones/*pharmacology Reproduction/drug effects; |
| Notes: | "MedlineCamiletti, Alison L Awde, David N Thompson, Graham J eng Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't Germany 2013/12/11 Naturwissenschaften. 2014 Jan; 101(1):25-31. doi: 10.1007/s00114-013-1125-3. Epub 2013 Dec 10" |
