Functional Analysis of MsepOR13 in the Oriental Armyworm Mythimna separata (Walker)

In this study, we cloned an OR gene, MsepOR13, in M. separata. The sequence contained 1227 bp, encoding 408 amino acids. As showed in the qPCR experiment, MsepOR13 exhibited female antennae-biased expression, which suggested that it might play a vital role in regulating female-specific behaviors, such as oviposition sites selection (Liu et al., 2015). Meanwhile, we found MsepOR13 was also expressed in legs indicating that legs might assist insects to choose suitable oviposition sites. Previous studies found that female butterflies perceive oviposition stimulant by their foreleg tarsus and further determine the suitable feeding plant for larvae in Papilio polytes (Nakayama et al., 2003). Furtherly, 4 ORs were also identified by the legs transcriptome analysis in Ectropis obliqua (Ma et al., 2016), indicating that ORs expressed in legs was a ubiquitous phenomenon. During the past decade, the sex pheromone receptors have been well-deorphanized in many Lepidoptera species. However, the identification of ligands for the non-pheromone receptor ORs has significantly lagged behind, except for a few species such as D. melanogaster (Hallem et al., 2004; Kreher et al., 2005; Hallem et al., 2006), A. gambiae (Lu et al., 2007; Carey et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2010), and S. littoralis (Montagné et al., 2012; de Fouchier et al., 2017). In this study, MsepOR13 responded to 32 odorants and only three ligands elicited relative large response; this phenomenon was also found in studies of...
Source: Frontiers in Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research