AI Article Synopsis
- Female mosquitoes are the only ones that feed on blood from humans to help produce eggs, showcasing a clear difference between male and female feeding behaviors.
- Researchers discovered that a specific gene, which controls male courtship and mating behavior, also influences male mosquitoes' attraction to humans when altered.
- The study reveals how this gene can unexpectedly repurpose to impact female blood-feeding behavior in mosquitoes, which are significant carriers of diseases.
Article Abstract
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.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7806257 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63982 | DOI Listing |
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