Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University, New York, United States.
Kavli Neural Systems Institute, New York, United States.
Elife. 2020 Dec 7;9:e63982. doi: 10.7554/eLife.63982.
The 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 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 mutant mosquitoes and showed that males failed to mate, confirming the ancestral function of this gene in male sexual behavior. Remarkably 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 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.
蚊子在摄食方面表现出极端的性二态性。只有雌性蚊子被人类吸引并获得血液，然后利用血液来刺激产卵。该基因具有性别特异性剪接，并编码一个 BTB 锌指转录因子，被认为是昆虫中雄性求偶和交配行为的主要调节因子。我们生成了突变蚊子，并表明雄性蚊子无法交配，这证实了该基因在雄性性行为中的原始功能。值得注意的是，雄性蚊子也对活体人类宿主产生强烈的吸引力，而野生型雄性蚊子从不表现出这种行为，这表明雄性蚊子拥有寻找宿主所需的中枢或外周神经回路，而去除 则揭示了雄性蚊子中这种潜在的行为。我们的研究结果强调了一个意想不到的情况，即一个雄性特异性性行为的主要调节因子被重新用于控制致命传染病媒介中雌性特异性吸血行为的一个模块。
