An odorant receptor from the common cutworm (Spodoptera litura) exclusively tuned to the important plant volatile cis‐3‐Hexenyl acetate

Abstract

Olfaction plays an important role in insect behaviours. The odorant receptor (OR) repertoire, housed within the dendritic membrane of sensory neurons, is one of the primary determinants of odour recognition. ORs in moths could be classified into pheromone receptors (PRs) and non-pheromone receptors (non-PR ORs). Much research in the field of insect olfaction recently has been focused on PRs of the male moth, but few Lepidoptera studies have been done on the functional study of non-PR ORs. In the present study, we identified and characterized four non-PR ORs from Spodoptera litura (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) antennae. The tissue expression pattern showed that the four ORs were mainly expressed in adult antennae and further in situ hybridization revealed SlituOR12 was expressed in both long and short sensilla trichodea and sensilla basiconica. A functional analysis of the four SlituORs was conducted in the heterologous expression system Xenopus oocytes. SlituOR12 was exclusively and sensitively tuned to cis-3-Hexenyl acetate and SlituOR19 slightly responded to 4'-Ethylacetophenone; however, SlituOR44 and SlituOR51 did not respond to any chemicals tested in this study. It is proposed that SlituOR12 might partially account for some key behaviours of the female, such as detection of host location and oviposition site.

Functional evolution of Lepidoptera olfactory receptors revealed by deorphanization of a moth repertoire

“…Thanks to the present results on S. littoralis ORs, receptors have now been deorphanized in 13 different clades of the lepidopteran OR phylogeny, including previous results obtained from Bombyx mori and other moths353637383940414243. To investigate the evolution of OR function in this insect order, we therefore placed these functional data in a phylogenetic framework, although it must be noted that these ORs have been deorphanized using different expression systems and different odorant panels.…”

A Female-Biased Odorant Receptor from Apolygus lucorum (Meyer-Dür) Tuned to Some Plant Odors

“…The selective response of AlucOR46 to plant volatiles and its female-biased expression suggest that this receptor could be involved by A. lucorum in locating host plant for feeding and oviposition [21,22,23]. …”

An olfactory receptor from Apolygus lucorum (Meyer-Dur) mainly tuned to volatiles from flowering host plants

“…To investigate the specificity of the four selected ORs, we expressed them together with AlucOrco in Xenopus oocytes, following a strategy successfully adopted with the ORs from other insect species Sun et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2010;Zhang et al, 2013aZhang et al, , 2014. The ORs thus expressed were stimulated with an odorant collection of 71 chemicals, including green leaf volatiles (GLVs) and other terpenoids, both aliphatic and aromatic, at the concentration of 10 À4 M.…”

“…Zhang et al, 2013a have identified an OR (SlituOR12) exclusively responding to (Z)-3-Hexenyl acetate from Spodoptera litura (Zhang et al, 2013a). The identity of these 4 ORs (BmorOR24, BmorOR29, SlituOR12 and AlucOR28) was only $27.8% (Supplementary material S4A).…”