Drosophila Fruit Flies: Article Analysis

This review article describes how the mating decision of Drosophila fruit flies is dependent of first the male’s choice to mate and then the female’s choice to accept or reject the male. The article simplifies the mating by the neurobiology behind the male’s choice and then the female’s choice. Furthermore, the article describes how males rely on chemical signals to detect suitable courtship objects and distinguish female flies from males. According to the article, males courtship is based on pheromone detection which then elicits courtship singing. The neurobiology behind male pheromone detection and processing including how the chemical compound of the pheromone interacts with specific odorant receptors in the brain of male fruit flies is …show more content…
The article described that transcripts initiated from the most distal P1 promoter (in the fru gene) are spliced differently in males and females thus making the fru gene a sexual specific spliced gene. This fact about the fru gene has allowed the author’s of this article to hypothesize that specific splicing of the fru P1 transcripts elicits male courtship behavior and sexual orientation. The article continues on to perform experiments (using mutant fru alleles) to determine if their hypothesis was correct. The results of the various experiments found that the researchers hypothesized correctly and that male courtship behavior requires specific ‘male mode’ splicing in the transcripts initiated from the distal P1 promoter. The results of the experiments in the article also found that the fru regulates male sexual behavior but not the gross sexual anatomy and male spliced fru genes inhibit female reproductive behaviors. This article differs from other articles in that it not only explains the neurobiology of the mating behavior but also the physical mating behavior of the male fly such as the male tapping the female with his forelegs and licking her genitalia. From reading various articles, it is clear that there are various neurobiological components (including neurons and genes) of the fruit fly brain that influence mating behavior and most papers that I selected attempted to address these numerous components. However, this paper differs from the other papers due to the fact that it picked simply one component (splicing of the fru P1 transcripts) that the author’s hypothesized was the most important factor that affecting mating behaviors and focused the majority of the paper on this topic. Additionally, this article differed from other sources in my bibliography because rather than simply stating that the fru gene is linking to mating behavior, the author’s of