'Moths in love' 🥰 🤩 Thank you!

This work was led by @ssjang.bsky.social along with co-authors: Sanjana Mandala, Hanjie Jiang, Xiao Zhang, and was an excellent collaboration with the lab of Phil Cole! 8/8

Covalent bonding between odorant receptors and aldehyde ligands might be a conserved strategy towards this common chemical class, with interesting implications for sensory transduction. 7/8

Our findings reveal a conserved recognition strategy for pheromone sensing across Lepidopteran, providing new avenues towards development of strategies to manage populations of these harmful agricultural pests. 6/8

We found a unique molecular mechanism in the silkmoth Bombyx mori’s pheromone system, where an odorant receptor forms a reversible covalent bond with an aldehyde pheromone to enable exquisite discrimination between similar compounds. 5/8

Recognition of volatile odorants is generally thought to occur through distributed, flexible hydrophobic interactions between odorants and odorant receptors. 4/8

These volatile love signals, called pheromones, are the quintessential example of olfactory accuracy: moths must detect and discriminate compounds that differ by as little as a hydrogen atom. 3/8

Male moths find their mating partners by sniffing out a signature compound emitted by receptive females - and telling it apart from compounds emitted by other species. 2/8