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February 15 2011
For Fruit Flies, There’s Such a Thing as “Too Sexy”
Beauty doesn’t only fade within a lifetime–it also fades genetically over the course of several generations, according to new research. Scientists studying populations of sexually attractive male fruit flies have found that there’s a limit to their evolutionary success–and that there may actually be a disadvantage to being too sexy.
For the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers genetically modified male fruit flies, causing them to give off excessive amounts of attractive pheromones. The scientists then introduced a flock of these foxy fellows to a normal fruit fly population. They discovered that the female flies mated with these modified flies more often initially, and the proportion of super-sexy males increased for a while–but the proportions returned to normal after seven generations.
As The New York Times reports:
“Even though we were able to make males more attractive, there must have been a fitness cost,” said Katrina McGuigan, a biologist at the University of Queensland and one of the study’s authors. “While sexual selection is really powerful, there are consequences to nonsexual traits.”
It’s not yet clear what genetic disadvantage these fruit fly ladykillers ...
Mmm, These Vibrating Molecules Smell Wonderful
The humble fruit fly is overturning the science of smell. Using the fruit fly’s sensitive schnoz, scientists now have evidence that the sense of smell isn’t only a matter of molecular shape–it might also have something to do with how the molecules entering the nose vibrate.
Previously, scientists thought that we perceive a particular smell when an olfactory molecule’s shape matches the shape of receptors in our nose. The molecule enters the receptor, and so we perceive the particular smell triggered by that lock-and-key scenario. But in 1996, MIT Biophysicist Luca Turin suggested that the patterns in which molecules vibrate are what control odor.
So Turin teamed up with Efthimios Skoulakis, a researcher at the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Vari, Greece, to test the theory. They did this by harnessing the power of isotopes: deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, has the same shape as a regular hydrogen atom, but it vibrates at a different frequency because of the added neutrons. If a fruit fly can tell the difference between an atom and its isotope, it suggests that vibrations influence the sense of smell.
Fruit flies, it ...
January 19 2011
May 27 2010
Genetically Engineered Bugs Can Smell Blue Light
Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling.
Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light.
The team, under the guidance of Klemens Störtkuhl at Ruhr University Bochum, is attempting to understand “olfactory coding”–how the brain transforms chemical signals into perceptible smells. Normally, a fly’s olfactory receptor neurons only send an electrical signal to its brain when the fly smells something, but by adding a protein the researchers caused a neuron to fire when the one-millimeter bug was basking in blue light.
The fly brain uses some of its 28 olfactory neurons to detect bad smells, and others for good ones. Protein puppeteers, the researchers could pick which neuron to add the light-sensing protein to. The good-smelling neurons respond to a smorgasbord of fly-friendly scents: like banana, marzipan, and glue (apparently rotting fruit gives off these scents). By attaching the light-sensitive protein to one of these neurons, researchers caused the typically light-fearing insects to crawl straight towards the blue glow.
According to a ScienceDaily article, given their successful mapping of these larvae olfactory neurons, the researchers next hope to make adult fruit flies go bananas.
Related content:
Discoblog: Neuroscientist Says We Perceive “Smounds”—Half Sound, Half Smell
80beats: A Life-Extending Coup: Flies That Can’t Smell Food Live 30 Percent Longer
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Smell a lady, shrug off flu – how female odours give male mice an immune boost
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Elephants smell the difference between human ethnic groups
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells
Image: flickr / Jason Gulledge
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