Researchers in Japan have genetically transferred a unique courtship behavior from one fruit fly species to another. The achievement is the first example of behavior being transferred between species through single gene manipulation.
The project was a collaboration between Nagoya University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
In nature, male fruit flies generally court females by rapidly vibrating their wings thereby creating sounds – “courtship songs”. However, one species – Drosophila subobscura – has a different behavior: males regurgitate food and offer it as a gift to females during courtship. The team succeeded in transferring this behavior to another species, Drosophila melanogaster.
“When we activated the fru gene in insulin-producing neurons of singing flies to produce FruM proteins, the cells grew long neural projections and connected to the courtship center in the brain, creating new brain circuits that produce gift-giving behavior in D. melanogaster for the first time,” Dr. Tanaka Ryoya, co-lead author and lecturer at Nagoya University, explains.
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Submitted by Morten Anderson
