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Mating increases Drosophila melanogaster females’ choosiness by reducing olfactory sensitivity to a male pheromone

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 1165–1173 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Females that are highly selective when choosing a mate run the risk of remaining unmated or delaying commencing reproduction. Therefore, low female choosiness would be beneficial when males are rare but it would be maladaptive if males become more frequent. How can females resolve this issue? Polyandry would allow mating-status-dependent choosiness, with virgin females selecting their first mate with little selectivity and becoming choosier thereafter. This plasticity in choosiness would ensure timely acquisition of sperm and enable females to increase offspring quality during later mating. Here, we show that Drosophila melanogaster females display such mating-status-dependent choosiness by becoming more selective once mated and identify the underlying neurohormonal mechanism. Mating releases juvenile hormone, which desensitizes Or47b olfactory neurons to a pheromone produced by males, resulting in increased preference for pheromone-rich males. Besides providing a mechanism to a long-standing evolutionary prediction, these data suggest that intersexual selection in D. melanogaster, and possibly in all polyandrous, sperm-storing species, is mainly the domain of mated females since virgin females are less selective. Juvenile hormone influences behaviour by changing cue responsiveness across insects; the neurohormonal modulation of olfactory neurons uncovered in D. melanogaster provides an explicit mechanism for how this hormone modulates behavioural plasticity.

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Fig. 1: Increased choosiness between virgin and mated state in D. melanogaster females.
Fig. 2: Or47b ORN is necessary for plastic female choosiness and decreases in sensitivity to palmitoleic acid after mating.
Fig. 3: JH reduces Or47b ORN sensitivity.
Fig. 4: Transcriptomic differences between the antennae of virgin and mated females.

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Data availability

Raw sequencing reads are available at the National Center for Biotechnology Information Short Read Archive (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra/SRX9940561); accession no. PRJNA694952. All other raw data are available at Dataverse-NL (https://doi.org/10.34894/454UBX).

Code availability

R scripts and the gene expression analysis code are available on Dataverse-NL.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Wang for critical advice on the experiments and manuscript and M. Maan, T. Verschut and M. Laturney for feedback on the manuscript. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Dutch organization for scientific research (no. ALWOP.611) to J.-C.B., a fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (no. 57386478) and a fellowship of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (no. LPDS 2018-11) to P.K. and grants from the National Institutes of Health to C.-Y.S. (nos. R01DC016466, R01DC015519 and R21DC108912).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Groningen Institute for Evolutionary Life Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

    Philip Kohlmeier, Jenke A. Gorter & Jean-Christophe Billeter

  2. Neurobiology Section, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Ye Zhang & Chih-Ying Su

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Contributions

P.K., C.-Y.S. and J.-C.B. designed the study. P.K. and J.-C.B. performed the behavioural experiments, analytical chemistry, RNA-seq and data analysis. Y.Z. performed the single-sensillum recordings. J.A.G. provided the reagents. P.K., Y.Z., C.-Y.S. and J.-C.B. wrote the manuscript with feedback from all authors.

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Correspondence to Jean-Christophe Billeter.

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Peer review information Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Mariana Wolfner, Jen Perry and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Mating latency is influenced by an interaction between female mating status and male genotype.

Canton-S virgin females were offered a single male (Nl or Tai) for mating. After mating, females were isolated for 24h and offered a new single male (Nl or Tai) for remating. Virgin and mated female mating latency was recorded. PLots display (Mean ± s.e.m). A generalized linear mixed model including mating latency as a response variable, male genotype (Nl vs. Tai), female mating status (virgin, mated) and their interaction as explanatory factors and female ID as a random factor revealed that mating latency is influenced by an interaction between male genotype and mating status (GLMM: p = 0.038). The interaction was then explored using posthoc tests.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Expression of transcripts potentially modulating neuronal sensitivity.

Normalized and log transformed read counts of antennal transcriptomes separated by mating status. Isoforms marked with (*) were differentially expressed between virgin and mated females (Mean ± s.e.m). *: p<0.05; **:p<0.01; ***:p<0.001.

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Kohlmeier, P., Zhang, Y., Gorter, J.A. et al. Mating increases Drosophila melanogaster females’ choosiness by reducing olfactory sensitivity to a male pheromone. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 1165–1173 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01482-4

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