MATING is all very well, but if an insect doesn鈥檛 stop courting and start laying eggs afterwards, its population won鈥檛 grow. Now researchers have found the gene that is crucial to this behavioural switch, suggesting a possible way to control insect populations.
Female mosquitoes and fruit flies spend a lot of time enticing males to mate with them. But once they have succeeded, their behaviour changes and they start laying eggs. The trigger for this is a small protein called sex peptide (SP) in the male鈥檚 semen.
Barry Dickson and colleagues at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, were searching for genes that controlled the reproductive process, and found that when they turned one off, females kept on courting and didn鈥檛 lay many eggs. This was the gene for the SP receptor, expressed in the reproductive tract and in brain areas involved in mating.
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The team has discovered the same receptor in several insect species, including Aedes aegypti, a mosquito that carries dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya. Blocking it might be an 鈥渁ttractive target鈥� for insect control, says Dickson, because affected females would remain in the mating pool, keeping males occupied 鈥� and away from females that fancied settling down and laying eggs.
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