In the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, the dauer pheromone is the primary cue for entry into the developmentally arrested, dauer larval stage. The dauer is specialized for survival under harsh environmental conditions and is considered "nonaging" because larvae that exit dauer have a normal life span. C. elegans constitutively secretes the dauer pheromone into its environment, enabling i...

Ant colony optimisation is a constructive metaheuristic in which solutions are built probabilistically influenced by the parameters of a pheromone model—an analogue of the trail pheromones used by real ants when foraging for food. Recent studies have uncovered the presence of biases in the solution construction process, the existence and nature of which depend on the characteristics of the prob...

The mechanisms whereby different external cues stimulate the same mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade, yet trigger an appropriately distinct biological response, epitomize the conundrum of specificity in cell signaling. In yeast, shared upstream components of the mating pheromone and filamentous growth pathways activate two related MAPKs, Fus3 and Kss1, which in turn regulate progra...

In the past decades, the sex pheromone composition in female moths has been analyzed by different methods, ranging from volatile collections to gland extractions, which all have some disadvantage: volatile collections can generally only be conducted on (small) groups of females to detect the minor pheromone compounds, whereas gland extractions are destructive. Direct-contact SPME overcomes some...

Previously we showed that the primer pheromone responsible for the "male effect" was produced in specific skin regions of castrated male goats by androgen treatments. In the present study, we examined whether androgen can also induce production of the male effect pheromone in female goats. Capsules containing dihydrotestosterone (DHT) or testosterone (T) were subcutaneously implanted into six o...

Alarm pheromone and its major component isopentylacetate induce stress-like responses in forager honey bees, impairing their ability to associate odors with a food reward. We investigated whether isopentylacetate exposure decreases appetitive learning also in young worker bees. While isopentylacetate-induced learning deficits were observed in guards and foragers collected from a queen-right col...

4apillary gas chromatography and mass spectrometry were used to quantify the amounts of Eand Zchalcogran and methyl (E,Z)-2,4-decadienoate (E,Z-MD), pheromone synergists of the bark beetle Pitygenes chalcographus (Coleoptera: Scolytidae). Males were exposed or not to vapours of host (Norway spruce, Picea abies) oleoresin or allowed to feed in host logs prior to extraction of body parts and hind...

Pheromones have essential roles in the social behavior of most animals. Studies of pheromone-driven behaviors are especially attractive in Drosophila melanogaster, because these insects are genetically and molecularly well characterized, have relatively simple central nervous systems compared with vertebrates, and yet they display complex behaviors controlled by sophisticated sensory systems. L...

We propose a pheromone-based traffic management model, which simultaneously optimizes vehicle re-routing and traffic light control. Specifically, each car agent deposits multiple digital pheromone on its route. The road infrastructure agents fuse the pheromone to forecast traffic conditions. Once a congested road is predicted, we adopt a proactive vehicle re-routing algorithm for assigning alte...

An ant deposits pheromone along the path that it travels and is more likely to choose a path with a higher concentration of pheromone. The sensing and dropping of pheromone makes it easy to understand the trail forming behavior of ants. The reinforcement tendency of pheromone following behavior ensures selection of the shortest path from a set of paths. The reinforcement tendency of pheromone f...