Pheromone articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Male fruitflies quickly learn that courting already-mated females is useless. It turns out that a small subset of neurons in the male brain signals this negative experience and controls pheromone sensitivity. See Letter p.145

    • Aki Ejima

  • Letter |

    Young male fruitflies learn to avoid futile courtship of non-virgin females because the latter are scented with the male pheromone cis-vaccenyl acetate; this behaviour results from an increase in the males’ innate sensitivity for the pheromone and is controlled by a small set of dopaminergic neurons.

    • Krystyna Keleman
    • , Eleftheria Vrontou
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • News & Views |

    Some fruit odours sexually arouse male fruitflies. The response is mediated by olfactory neurons that are sensitive to food smells and plug into the brain's neural circuit for sexual behaviour. See Letter p.236

    • Benjamin Prud'homme
    •  & Nicolas Gompel

  • Letter |

    Innate differences between male and female behaviours must be inscribed in their respective genomes, but how these encode distinct neuronal circuits remains largely unclear. Focusing on sex specific responses to the cVA pheromone in fruitflies, a chain of four successive neurons carrying olfactory signals down to motor centres has been identified, with all male to female anatomical differences lying downstream of a conserved sensory cell. The techniques developed should help others in the task of neuronal circuit mapping, which remains daunting even for the relatively simple fly brain.

    • Vanessa Ruta
    • , Sandeep Robert Datta
    •  & Richard Axel

  • Letter |

    Although pheromones and their detection by the vomeronasal organ are known to govern social behaviour in mice, specific chemical signals have rarely been linked to selective behavioural responses. Here the authors show that the ESP1 peptide secreted in male tears makes females sexually receptive, and identify its specific vomeronasal receptor and the sex-specific neuronal circuits activated during the behavioural response.

    • Sachiko Haga
    • , Tatsuya Hattori
    •  & Kazushige Touhara

  • Letter |

    The European corn borer consists of two sex pheromone races, leading to strong reproductive isolation which could represent a first step in speciation. Female sex pheromone production and male behavioural response are under the control of different genes, but the identity of these genes is unknown. These authors show that allelic variation in a gene essential for pheromone biosynthesis accounts for the phenotypic variation in female pheromone production, leading to race-specific signals.

    • Jean-Marc Lassance
    • , Astrid T. Groot
    •  & Christer Löfstedt

  • Letter |

    Before mating, a yeast cell must detect a partner cell that is close enough and expresses sufficiently large amounts of a sex pheromone. The mating decision is an all-or-none, switch-like response to pheromone concentration. It is now shown that this decision involves the competition of one kinase and one phosphatase enzyme for multiple phosphorylation sites on a 'scaffold' protein. The results should prompt a re-evaluation of the role of related signalling molecules that have been implicated in cancer.

    • Mohan K. Malleshaiah
    • , Vahid Shahrezaei
    •  & Stephen W. Michnick

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