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Characterization of a sex pheromone in a simultaneous hermaphroditic shrimp, Lysmata wurdemanni

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Abstract

Olfactory chemical cues have been described to play important roles in the control of mate recognition in many decapod crustaceans. However, we still know very little about the chemical characteristics of the cues that coordinate pre-copulative behaviour. In this study, we partially characterized a waterborne sex pheromone of a marine shrimp, Lysmata wurdemanni. Female moulting water was collected and ultrafiltered using 1,000 and 500-Da membranes, respectively, and analysed using HPLC with a Lichrosphere™ RP18 (C18) column. The sex pheromone is likely to be a molecule between 500 and 1,000 Da in size because behavioural bioassays showed that males responded to the supernatant of 500-Da and to the 1,000-Da filtrate, but did not respond to the supernatant of 1,000-Da or to the 500-Da filtrate. There was only one dominant peak (2.86 min) detectable in HPLC chromatograms of the supernatant of the 500-Da filtration. This peak showed a UV absorbance maximum at 274 nm, similar to the recently identified shore crab sex pheromone Uridine-di-phosphate (UDP). Behavioural bioassays confirmed that this peak is a bioactive component of a potential pheromone bouquet, but is different from UDP, which showed no bioactivity in Lysmata wurdemanni. Our results lay the foundation for future studies to purify and eventually identify this sex pheromone.

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Acknowledgments

This project was supported partially by the project 5010 of Wenzhou Medical College. We thank Andrew L. Rhyne for collecting the shrimp. We are grateful for the valuable comments made by the reviewers of the manuscript. The experiments comply with the current laws of the United States.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Public Health, Wenzhou Medical College, 325035, Wenzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Dong Zhang

  2. Vero Beach Marine Laboratory, Florida Institute of Technology, 805 46th Place East, Vero Beach, FL, 32963, USA

    Dong Zhang & Junda Lin

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Hull University, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK

    Maggy Harley & Jörg D. Hardege

Authors
  1. Dong Zhang
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  2. Junda Lin
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  3. Maggy Harley
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  4. Jörg D. Hardege
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Dong Zhang or Jörg D. Hardege.

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Communicated by M. Byrne.

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Zhang, D., Lin, J., Harley, M. et al. Characterization of a sex pheromone in a simultaneous hermaphroditic shrimp, Lysmata wurdemanni . Mar Biol 157, 1–6 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-009-1290-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-009-1290-2

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