Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.
Elife. 2018 Mar 20;7:e34348. doi: 10.7554/eLife.34348.
In birds and higher mammals, auditory experience during development is critical to discriminate sound patterns in adulthood. However, the neural and molecular nature of this acquired ability remains elusive. In fruit flies, acoustic perception has been thought to be innate. Here we report, surprisingly, that auditory experience of a species-specific courtship song in developing shapes adult song perception and resultant sexual behavior. Preferences in the song-response behaviors of both males and females were tuned by social acoustic exposure during development. We examined the molecular and cellular determinants of this social acoustic learning and found that GABA signaling acting on the GABA receptor Rdl in the pC1 neurons, the integration node for courtship stimuli, regulated auditory tuning and sexual behavior. These findings demonstrate that maturation of auditory perception in flies is unexpectedly plastic and is acquired socially, providing a model to investigate how song learning regulates mating preference in insects.
在鸟类和高等哺乳动物中，发育过程中的听觉经验对于成年后辨别声音模式至关重要。然而，这种获得的能力的神经和分子性质仍然难以捉摸。在果蝇中，听觉被认为是先天的。在这里，我们令人惊讶地报告说，在发育过程中经历特定物种的求爱歌曲会塑造成年后的歌曲感知和由此产生的性行为。在发育过程中通过社交声暴露，雄性和雌性的歌曲反应行为偏好被调整。我们研究了这种社交声音学习的分子和细胞决定因素，发现 GABA 信号作用于 GABA 受体 Rdl 在 pC1 神经元上，即求爱刺激的整合节点，调节听觉调谐和性行为。这些发现表明，果蝇听觉感知的成熟出人意料地具有可塑性，并且是通过社交获得的，为研究昆虫中歌曲学习如何调节交配偏好提供了模型。
