Grooming, a common behavior in animals, serves the important function of removing foreign materials from body surfaces. When antennal grooming was prevented in the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, field emission gun scanning electron microscopy images revealed that an unstructured substance accumulated on nongroomed antennae, covering sensillar pores, but not on groomed antennae of th...

The neurogenic Notch locus of Drosophila encodes a receptor necessary for cell fate decisions within equivalence groups, such as proneural clusters. Specification of alternate fates within clusters results from inhibitory communication among cells having comparable neural fate potential. Genetically, Hairless (H) acts as an antagonist of most neurogenic genes and may insulate neural precursor c...

Olfactory receptor cells in insects are modulated by neurohormones. Recordings from cockroach olfactory sensilla showed that a subset of sensory neurons increase their responses to selected nonpheromone odorants after octopamine application. With octopamine application, recordings demonstrated increased firing rates by the short but not the long alcohol-sensitive sensilla to the nonpheromone vo...

Insect odorant receptors (ORs) have a unique design of heterodimers formed by an olfactory receptor protein and the ion channel Orco. Heterologously expressed insect ORs are activated via an ionotropic and a metabotropic pathway that leads to cAMP production and activates the Orco channel. The contribution of metabotropic signaling to the insect odor response remains to be elucidated. Disruptio...

This paper presents an on-going work to develop micromachined silicon-based strain sensor inspired from the campaniform sensillum of insects. We present simple optical setup for the characterisation of a membrane-in-recess structure as an early stage in mimicking the natural sensor. The microstructure is a 500 nm-thick SiO2/SiN circular membrane, burried 13 μm from the surface of a 3x3 mm, 525 ...

In insects olfaction is a primary sensory modality. As a result changes in the animal’s ecology are often paralleled by modifications in the olfactory system. Using a comparative approach between the generalist Drosophila melanogaster and its sibling specialist D. sechellia, I looked at the coding properties of the olfactory system. Using electrophysiology, neuroanatomy, and behavioral assays w...

(Z ,Z)-3,9-cw -6,7-Epoxyheptadecadiene, and (Z,Z)-6,9-cw-3,4-epoxyheptadecadiene were identified by gas chrom atography/flam e ionization detec tion -e lec troan tennograph ic detec­ tion (G C /F ID -E A D ) and coupled gas ch ro m ato g rap h y -m ass spectrom etry (G C-M S) from abdom inal tip extracts o f Tephrina arenacearia (Lepidoptera: G eom etridae), an alfalfa pest. In gas chrom atogra...

Male moths efficiently recognize conspecific sex pheromones thanks to their highly accurate and specific olfactory system. The Heliothis/Helicoverpa species are regarded as good models for studying the perception of sex pheromones. In this study, we performed a series of experiments to investigate the peripheral mechanisms of pheromone coding in two-closely related species, Helicoverpa armigera...

Application of solutions of each of the alkali halides to the tip of a labellar sensillum of the blowfly elicited a repetitive neural discharge from the salt receptor. The records were qualitatively similar to those for NaCl. For each of the alkali chlorides and sodium halides, the shapes of the curves of the response of the salt receptor as a function of concentration were similar to that for ...

Abstract This study begins to elucidate the cues and mechanisms by which the glassy-winged sharpshooter, Homalodisca vitripennis (Germar) (Hemiptera: Cicadellidae), select host plants for feeding and oviposition. The electrophysiological response of the anal styli of male and female H. vitripennis to water vapor was examined using a modified electroantennography (EAG) device (stylogram). A stro...