RESEARCH ARTICLE Fruitless mutant male mosquitoes gain attraction to human odor Nipun S Basrur1*, Maria Elena De Obaldia1, Takeshi Morita1, Margaret Herre1,2, Ricarda K von Heynitz1†, Yael N Tsitohay1, Leslie B Vosshall1,2,3* 1Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, The Rockefeller University, New York, United States; 2Kavli Neural Systems Institute, New York, United States; 3Howard Hughes Medical Institute, New York, United States Abstract The Aedes aegypti mosquito shows extreme sexual dimorphism in feeding. Only females are attracted to and obtain a blood-meal from humans, which they use to stimulate egg production. The fruitless gene is sex-specifically spliced and encodes a BTB zinc-finger transcription factor proposed to be a master regulator of male courtship and mating behavior across insects. We generated fruitless mutant mosquitoes and showed that males failed to mate, confirming the ancestral function of this gene in male sexual behavior. Remarkably, fruitless males also gain strong attraction to a live human host, a behavior that wild-type males never display, suggesting that male mosquitoes possess the central or peripheral neural circuits required to host-seek and that removing fruitless reveals this latent behavior in males. Our results highlight an unexpected repurposing of a master regulator of male-specific sexual behavior to control one module of female-specific blood-feeding behavior in a deadly vector of infectious diseases. *For correspondence:
[email protected] (NSB);
[email protected] (LBV) Introduction Across animals, males and females of the same species show striking differences in behavior. Male Present address: † Technical Paradisaeidae birds-of-paradise perform an elaborate courtship dance to seduce prospective female University of Munich, TUM partners, contorting their bodies in forms resembling flowers, ballerinas, and smiling faces School of Medicine, Munich, Germany (Scholes, 2008).