Bousquet François, Houot Benjamin, Chauvel Isabelle, Dupas Stéphane, Ferveur Jean-François
Unité Mixte de Recherche, Associée au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université de Bourgogne, Faculté des Sciences, Dijon, France.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1170:502-5. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.03927.x.
The evolution of communication is a fundamental biological problem. The genetic control of the signal and its reception must be tightly coadapted, especially in interindividual sexual communication. However, there is very little experimental evidence for tight genetic linkage connecting the emission of a signal and its reception. In Drosophila melanogaster, desat1 is the first known gene that simultaneously affects the emission and the perception of sex pheromones. Our experiments show that both aspects of pheromonal communication (the emission and the perception of sex pheromones) depend on distinct genetic control and may result from tissue-specific expression of different transcripts, all coding for the same desaturase. Therefore, and given the high conservation of its coding region, the pleiotropic activity of the desat1 gene may have arisen from an evolutionary process that shaped its regulatory regions.
通讯的进化是一个基本的生物学问题。信号及其接收的遗传控制必须紧密协同适应，尤其是在个体间的性通讯中。然而，几乎没有实验证据表明连接信号发射与其接收的紧密遗传连锁关系。在黑腹果蝇中，desat1是第一个已知的同时影响性信息素发射和感知的基因。我们的实验表明，性信息素通讯的两个方面（性信息素的发射和感知）依赖于不同的遗传控制，可能是由不同转录本的组织特异性表达导致的，所有转录本都编码同一种去饱和酶。因此，鉴于其编码区的高度保守性，desat1基因的多效性活性可能源于塑造其调控区的进化过程。
