Stress related odorants promote feeding in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract

The ability of organisms to adapt to the different stressful conditions such as fluctuation of food, temperature and overpopulation is vital for their survival. How an organism responds to these different stress cues varies from organism to organism depending on nature of the stress. Fruit fly, a model organism produce different pheromones called “stress odorants” (dSO) when subjected to various stressful stimuli. These pheromones produced by emitter flies is believed to act as signal that can be perceived through olfactory senses of the responder flies. The quest for what could be the effect of these odorants to the feeding behavior of other fly is answered in this work. Here, we observe that these odorants can promote the feeding to a certain extent. $CO_2$, 2-heptanone and 2-nonanone are supposed to be the major constituent dSO. The majority of the work is focused on trying to find out the component which is behind this enhanced feeding phenotype. So, the effect of combination of components and individual components on feeding is compared with their respective controls. As a result it was found out that $CO_2$ at a nearly 0.1% concentration could enhance the feeding and this same enhancement can be observed with exposing the flies to odorants of 2-heptanone.