Suppression of male courtship by a Drosophila pheromone receptor
Published in Nature Neuroscience
Genes expressed in the Drosophila head reveal a role for fat cells in sex-specific physiology.
Published in The EMBO Journal
The downstream effectors of the Drosophila sex determination cascade are mostly unknown and thought to mediate all aspects of sexual differentiation, physiology and behavior. Here, we employed serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) to identify male and female effectors expressed in the head, and report 46 sex-biased genes (>4-fold/P < 0.01). We ...
Or83b encodes a broadly expressed odorant receptor essential for Drosophila olfaction.
Published in Neuron Glia Biology
Fruit flies are attracted by a diversity of odors that signal the presence of food, potential mates, or attractive egg-laying sites. Most Drosophila olfactory neurons express two types of odorant receptor genes: Or83b, a broadly expressed receptor of unknown function, and one or more members of a family of 61 selectively expressed receptors. While ...
Atypical expression of Drosophila gustatory receptor genes in sensory and central neurons.
Published in The Journal of Comparative Neurology
Members of the Drosophila gustatory receptor (Gr) gene family are generally expressed in chemosensory neurons and are known to mediate the perception of sugars, bitter substrates, CO(2), and pheromones. The Gr gene family consists of 68 members, many of which are organized in gene clusters of up to six genes, yet only expression of about 15 Gr gene...
Nocturnal male sex drive in Drosophila.
Published in Current biology : CB
Many behaviors and physiological processes including locomotor activity, feeding, sleep, mating, and migration are dependent on daily or seasonally reoccurring, external stimuli. In D. melanogaster, one of the best-studied circadian behaviors is locomotion. The fruit fly is considered a diurnal (day active/night inactive) insect, based on locomotor...
Pheromone perception and behavior in Drosophila.
Published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Pheromones have essential roles in the social behavior of most animals. Studies of pheromone-driven behaviors are especially attractive in Drosophila melanogaster, because these insects are genetically and molecularly well characterized, have relatively simple central nervous systems compared with vertebrates, and yet they display complex behaviors...
Gustatory perception and behavior in Drosophila melanogaster.
Published in Current biology : CB
The sense of taste is essential for the survival of virtually all animals. Considered a primitive sense and present in the form of chemotaxis in many bacteria, taste is also a sense of sophistication in humans. Regardless, taste behavior is a crucial activity for the world s most abundant (insects) and most successful (mammals) inhabitants, provi...
Drosophila as a model for the identification of genes causing adult human heart disease.
Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Drosophila melanogaster genetics provides the advantage of molecularly defined P-element insertions and deletions that span the entire genome. Although Drosophila has been extensively used as a model system to study heart development, it has not been used to dissect the genetics of adult human heart disease because of an inability to phenotype the ...
A putative Drosophila pheromone receptor expressed in male-specific taste neurons is required for efficient courtship.
Published in Neuron Glia Biology
Propagation in higher animals requires the efficient and accurate display of innate mating behaviors. In Drosophila melanogaster, male courtship consists of a stereotypic sequence of behaviors involving multiple sensory modalities, such as vision, audition, and chemosensation. For example, taste bristles located in the male forelegs and the labial ...
Taste perception and coding in Drosophila.
Published in Current biology : CB
