The role of SNMPs in insect olfaction
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REVIEW
The role of SNMPs in insect olfaction Sina Cassau 1 & Jürgen Krieger 1 Received: 31 August 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The sense of smell enables insects to recognize olfactory signals crucial for survival and reproduction. In insects, odorant detection highly depends on the interplay of distinct proteins expressed by specialized olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) and associated support cells which are housed together in chemosensory units, named sensilla, mainly located on the antenna. Besides odorant-binding proteins (OBPs) and olfactory receptors, so-called sensory neuron membrane proteins (SNMPs) are indicated to play a critical role in the detection of certain odorants. SNMPs are insect-specific membrane proteins initially identified in pheromone-sensitive OSNs of Lepidoptera and are indispensable for a proper detection of pheromones. In the last decades, genome and transcriptome analyses have revealed a wide distribution of SNMP-encoding genes in holometabolous and hemimetabolous insects, with a given species expressing multiple subtypes in distinct cells of the olfactory system. Besides SNMPs having a neuronal expression in subpopulations of OSNs, certain SNMP types were found expressed in OSN-associated support cells suggesting different decisive roles of SNMPs in the peripheral olfactory system. In this review, we will report the state of knowledge of neuronal and non-neuronal members of the SNMP family and discuss their possible functions in insect olfaction. Keywords Olfactory sensilla . Olfactory sensory neuron . Pheromone detection . Sensory neuron membrane protein . CD36
Introduction The recognition of olfactory signals is of crucial importance for survival, reproduction, and communication with conspecifics in almost all insects. As a consequence, many species of this animal group have evolved an extraordinarily powerful sense of smell enabling a highly sensitive and precise detection of informative odorants originating from odor sources as diverse as food, predators, and oviposition sites as well as conspecifics that release pheromones (Hansson and Stensmyr 2011, Andersson et al. 2015). On their body surface, insects comprise hundreds to up to several ten thousand chemosensory units, called sensilla (Steinbrecht 1996, Shanbhag et al. 1999), mainly concentrated on their antenna and found in lower densities on other body parts, such as the palps, the labellum, the legs, the wing margins, and the ovipositor. Each odor-detecting sensillum is equipped with a number of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) and associated
* Jürgen Krieger [email protected] 1
Institute of Biology/Zoology, Department of Animal Physiology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, 06120 Halle (Saale), Germany
support cells which jointly express the proteins that ensure a sensitive and specific peripheral recognition of relevant infochemicals. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in enlightening the cellular and molecular basis of olfactory signal det
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