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Fruit Flies Avoid Plant's Poison08-31-09 | News

Fruit Flies Avoid Plant's Poison

Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).

Many plants protect themselves from hungry animals by producing toxic chemicals. In turn, animals rely on detecting the presence of these harmful chemicals to avoid consuming dangerous plant material. A new article investigates the response of an insect to a common plant weapon ?EUR??,,????'?????<

The work, from authors at the Institute of Functional Genomic of Montpellier, finds that the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster can recognize L-canavanine and identifies the cellular receptor that facilitates this recognition. Surprisingly, the receptor that identifies L-canavanine is not from the gustatory receptor family responsible for all known taste sensation in insects ?EUR??,,????'?????<

When fruit flies were forced to consume L-canavanine they subsequently failed to reproduce ?EUR??,,????'?????<

Genetically modified Drosophila that had the DmXR receptor disabled showed no such preference, again indicating the key role of the receptor in the tasting of this toxin. By observing Drosophila behaviour, the authors found that the application of L-canavanine to the flies' legs (where the taste receptors are) caused them to retract their mouthparts ?EUR??,,????'?????<

Understanding sensations in insects is not just of scientific interest ?EUR??,,????'?????<

This work was supported by fellowships from the Ministere de la Recherche and the Fondation pour la Recherche Medicale to CM, a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) postdoctoral fellowship to LS, by the ANR grant DROSDYN to MLP and by grants from the CNRS and Institut National de la Sant????????(R)???????(C) et de la Recherche M????????(R)???????(C)dicale (INSERM) to the Institut de G????????(R)???????(C)nomique Fonctionnelle. The small animal imaging core facility was supported by grants from the National Biophotonics and Imaging Platform (Ireland), R????????(R)???????(C)seau National des Genopoles, Institut Fede ratif de Recherche 3 (IFR3), and R????????(R)???????(C)gion Languedoc Roussillon. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Source: by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.