ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2014
Sexual dimorphism and natural variation within and among species in the Drosophila retinal mosaic.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sexual dimorphism in the complete connectome of thebioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sexually dimorphic and clock gene-specific effects of artificial light at night onProceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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- Heterochrony in orthodenticle expression is associated with ommatidial size variation between Drosophila species.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Multimodal interactions in Stomoxys navigation reveal synergy between olfaction and vision.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Evolution of compound eye morphology underlies differences in vision between closely related Drosophila species.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Stable flies sense and behaviorally respond to the polarization of light.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2023Article
- Synaptic targets of photoreceptors specialized to detect color and skylight polarization ineLife · 2021Article
- Interplay between sex determination cascade and major signaling pathways during Drosophila eye development: Perspectives for future research.Developmental biology · 2021Review
- Variation in Pleiotropic Hub Gene Expression Is Associated with Interspecific Differences in Head Shape and Eye Size in Drosophila.Molecular biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Multiple loci linked to inversions are associated with eye size variation in species of the Drosophila virilis phylad.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Genomic adaptations to aquatic and aerial life in mayflies and the origin of insect wings.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Characterization of the Genetic Architecture Underlying Eye Size Variation WithinG3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2020Article
- Horsefly object-directed polarotaxis is mediated by a stochastically distributed ommatidial subtype in the ventral retina.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Human eye conditions: insights from the fly eye.Human genetics · 2019Review
- Novel approach to quantitative spatial gene expression uncovers genetic stochasticity in the developing Drosophila eye.Evolution & development · 2019Article
- Establishment of the mayflyEvoDevo · 2019Review
- Article
- Adult Tea Green Leafhoppers, Empoasca onukii (Matsuda), Change Behaviors under Varying Light Conditions.PloS one · 2017Article
- The evolutionary diversity of insect retinal mosaics: common design principles and emerging molecular logic.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2015Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundInsect compound eyes are composed of ommatidia, which contain photoreceptor cells that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light defined by the specific rhodopsin proteins that they express. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has several different ommatidium types that can be localised to specific retinal regions, such as the dorsal rim area (DRA), or distributed stochastically in a mosaic across the retina, like the 'pale' and 'yellow' types. Variation in these ommatidia patterns very likely has important implications for the vision of insects and could underlie behavioural and environmental adaptations. However, despite the detailed understanding of ommatidia specification in D. melanogaster, the extent to which the frequency and distribution of the different ommatidium types vary between sexes, strains and species of Drosophila is not known.
resultsWe investigated the frequency and distribution of ommatidium types based on rhodopsin protein expression, and the expression levels of rhodopsin transcripts in the eyes of both sexes of different strains of D. melanogaster, D. simulans and D. mauritiana. We found that while the number of DRA ommatidia was invariant, Rh3 expressing ommatidia were more frequent in the larger eyes of females compared to the males of all species analysed. The frequency and distribution of ommatidium types also differed between strains and species. The D. simulans strain ZOM4 has the highest frequency of Rh3 expressing ommatidia, which is associated with a non-stochastic patch of pale and odd-coupled ommatidia in the dorsal-posterior of their eyes.
conclusionsOur results show that there is striking variation in the frequency and distribution of ommatidium types between sexes, strains and species of Drosophila. This suggests that evolutionary changes in the underlying regulatory mechanisms can alter the distribution of ommatidium types to promote or restrict their expression in specific regions of the eye within and between species, and that this could cause differences in vision among these flies.
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