Fruitless alternative splicing and sex behaviour in insects: an ancient and unforgettable love story?
J Genet
; 89(3): 287-99, 2010 Sep.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-20876995
ABSTRACT
Courtship behaviours are common features of animal species that reproduce sexually. Typically, males are involved in courting females. Insects display an astonishing variety of courtship strategies primarily based on innate stereotyped responses to various external stimuli. In Drosophila melanogaster, male courtship requires proteins encoded by the fruitless (fru) gene that are produced in different sex-specific isoforms via alternative splicing. Drosophila mutant flies with loss-of-function alleles of the fru gene exhibit blocked male courtship behaviour. However, various individual steps in the courtship ritual are disrupted in fly strains carrying different fru alleles. These findings suggest that fru is required for specific steps in courtship. In distantly related insect species, various fru paralogues were isolated, which shows conservation of sex-specific alternative splicing and protein expression in neural tissues and suggests an evolutionary functional conservation of fru in the control of male-specific courtship behaviour. In this review, we report the seminal findings regarding the fru gene, its splicing regulation and evolution in insects.
Buscar no Google
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Comportamento Sexual Animal
/
Fatores de Transcrição
/
Processamento Alternativo
/
Proteínas de Insetos
/
Proteínas de Drosophila
/
Proteínas do Tecido Nervoso
Limite:
Animals
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2010
Tipo de documento:
Article