Salvemini Marco, Polito Catello, Saccone Giuseppe
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, 80134, Naples, Italy.
J Genet. 2010 Sep;89(3):287-99. doi: 10.1007/s12041-010-0040-z.
Courtship behaviours are common features of animal species that reproduce sexually. Typically, males are involved in courting females. Insects display an astonishing variety of courtship strategies primarily based on innate stereotyped responses to various external stimuli. In Drosophila melanogaster, male courtship requires proteins encoded by the fruitless (fru) gene that are produced in different sex-specific isoforms via alternative splicing. Drosophila mutant flies with loss-of-function alleles of the fru gene exhibit blocked male courtship behaviour. However, various individual steps in the courtship ritual are disrupted in fly strains carrying different fru alleles. These findings suggest that fru is required for specific steps in courtship. In distantly related insect species, various fru paralogues were isolated, which shows conservation of sex-specific alternative splicing and protein expression in neural tissues and suggests an evolutionary functional conservation of fru in the control of male-specific courtship behaviour. In this review, we report the seminal findings regarding the fru gene, its splicing regulation and evolution in insects.
求偶行为是有性繁殖动物物种的共同特征。通常情况下，雄性会参与对雌性的求偶。昆虫表现出令人惊讶的各种求偶策略，主要基于对各种外部刺激的先天刻板反应。在黑腹果蝇中，雄性求偶需要无果（fru）基因编码的蛋白质，这些蛋白质通过可变剪接产生不同的性别特异性异构体。携带fru基因功能丧失等位基因的果蝇突变体表现出雄性求偶行为受阻。然而，在携带不同fru等位基因的果蝇品系中，求偶仪式的各个步骤会受到干扰。这些发现表明，fru是求偶特定步骤所必需的。在远缘昆虫物种中，分离出了各种fru旁系同源物，这表明在神经组织中性别特异性可变剪接和蛋白质表达具有保守性，并暗示fru在控制雄性特异性求偶行为方面具有进化功能保守性。在这篇综述中，我们报告了关于fru基因及其在昆虫中的剪接调控和进化的开创性发现。
