| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,700,000)
Fiscal Year 1992: ¥300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 1991: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
We have isolated several mutants with defects in different aspects of mating behavior from fly strains carrying single P-element insertions in the second or third chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster. We employed two screening methods, oscillographic recordings of courtship songs generated by a male paired with a virgin female and observation of a single male-female pair in a mating chamber(1 cm^3 in volume)for an hour under a dissecting microscope to estimate the latency of copulation and its duration for each strain.
One of the mutants, spinster, is a female-sterile mutant with subnormal receptivity to copulation : virgin spinster females consistently performed repelling movements including elevating the tip of the abdomen, decamping and kicking, in response to courting males. Cloning and sequencing of the spinster gene revealed that this gene encodes a novel protein having several membrane-spanning domains and that this protein has a portion similar to a monoamine-transporter protein.
Another mutant, satori, alters the sexual orientation of male flies, making them homosexual : satori male flies court males instead of females. We have detected cells expressing a reporter gene, lacZ, encoding the bacterial beta-galactosidase in the brain of satori male flies. We tested for complimentation with the other already known male-sterile mutation, fruitless, in which male flies court both males and females, that is, fruitless males are bisexual, indicationg that these two mutations are not allelic to each other. Molecular genetic analysis of this gene is currently under way.
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