Mirror Image Pheromones Help Beetles Swipe Right
There are many ways to communicate with prospective romantic partners: If you are a Japanese scarab beetle, it’s a matter of distinguishing left from right. New work from U.S. and Chinese scientists, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows how these beetles use mirror-image pheromones to find a mate. The work could lead to better monitoring and control of significant agricultural pests.
The Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica, is a major agricultural pest that cannot be legally imported into the United States. In 1977, researchers discovered that females of P. japonica attract males with a pheromone, japonilure. Like most biological molecules, japonilure can exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, the R-form and S-form. R-japonilure attracts males but S-japonilure repels them.
Twenty years later, Walter Leal, now professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis, and senior author on the new paper, discovered that a different, closely related scarab beetle, Anomala osakana, also uses japonilure as a sex pheromone, but the other way round: the S-form attracts males and the R-form repels them.