Decoding the genetic and chemical basis of sexual attractiveness in parasitic wasps
- University of Münster, Germany
Abstract
Attracting and securing potential mating partners is of fundamental importance for reproduction. Therefore, signaling sexual attractiveness is expected to be tightly coordinated in communication systems synchronizing senders and receivers. Chemical signaling has permeated through all taxa of life as the earliest and most widespread form of communication and is particularly prevalent in insects. However, it has been notoriously difficult to decipher how exactly information related to sexual signaling is encoded in complex chemical profiles. Similarly, our knowledge of the genetic basis of sexual signaling is very limited and usually restricted to a few case studies with comparably simple pheromonal communication mechanisms. The present study jointly addresses these two knowledge gaps by characterizing two fatty acid synthase genes, that most likely evolved by tandem gene duplication, simultaneously impacting sexual attractiveness and complex chemical surface profiles in parasitic wasps. Gene knock-down in female wasps dramatically reduces their sexual attractiveness coinciding with a drastic decrease in male courtship and copulation behavior. Concordantly, we found a striking shift of methyl-branching patterns in the female surface pheromonal compounds, which we subsequently demonstrate to be the main cause for the greatly reduced male response. Intriguingly, this suggests a potential coding mechanism for sexual attractiveness mediated by specific methyl-branching patterns in CHC profiles. So far, the genetic underpinnings of methyl-branched CHCs are not well understood despite their high potential for encoding information. Our study sheds light on how biologically relevant information can be encoded in complex chemical profiles and on the genetic basis of sexual attractiveness.
Data availability
The datasets generated or analyzed during this study are available at the figshare data repository under 10.6084/m9.figshare.20411958
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (427879779)
- Jan Buellesbach
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Sun et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 604
- views
-
- 118
- downloads
-
- 5
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Decoding the genetic and chemical basis of sexual attractiveness in parasitic wasps
eLife 12:e86182.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.86182
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended. As a result, our understanding of how chemical defense evolved in this group is incomplete. Here, we provide new data showing that, in contrast to previous studies, species from each undefended poison frog clade have measurable yet low amounts of alkaloids. We confirm that undefended dendrobatids regularly consume mites and ants, which are known sources of alkaloids. Thus, our data suggest that diet is insufficient to explain the defended phenotype. Our data support the existence of a phenotypic intermediate between toxin consumption and sequestration — passive accumulation — that differs from sequestration in that it involves no derived forms of transport and storage mechanisms yet results in low levels of toxin accumulation. We discuss the concept of passive accumulation and its potential role in the origin of chemical defenses in poison frogs and other toxin-sequestering organisms. In light of ideas from pharmacokinetics, we incorporate new and old data from poison frogs into an evolutionary model that could help explain the origins of acquired chemical defenses in animals and provide insight into the molecular processes that govern the fate of ingested toxins.
-
- Ecology
Tracking wild pigs with GPS devices reveals how their social interactions could influence the spread of disease, offering new strategies for protecting agriculture, wildlife, and human health.
