How flies respond to honey bee pheromone: the role of the foraging gene on reproductive response to queen mandibular pheromone

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• 作者：Alison L. Camiletti (1)
  David N. Awde (1)
  Graham J. Thompson (1)
  
• 关键词：Pheromone response ; Genetic effect ; Insect reproduction ; Rover ; sitter polymorphism ; Apis mellifera ; Drosophila melanogaster
• 刊名：Naturwissenschaften
• 出版年：2014
• 出版时间：January 2014
• 年：2014
• 卷：101
• 期：1
• 页码：25-31
• 全文大小：281 KB
• 作者单位：Alison L. Camiletti (1)
  David N. Awde (1)
  Graham J. Thompson (1)
  
  1. Biology Department, Western University, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 5B7, Canada
  
• ISSN：1432-1904

文摘

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.