Fig. 3. Desat1 regulates male flight activity and mating.

(A and B) Silencing desat1 expression in An. stephensi (A) and An. gambiae s.s. (B) virgin males causes reduction of female insemination. (C) Flight activity of An. stephensi virgin male mosquitoes injected with dsGFP (black) or dsdesat1(red) and maintained under 12-hour–12-hour LD cycles. Values show the total activity within each hourly time bin (mean ± SEM) of 16 mosquitoes in one treatment. The white and black bar below the graph denotes when lights were on and off, respectively. Lights on occurred at ZT0 and lights off occurred at ZT12. (D and E) Silencing per (D) or tim (E) influences the expression pattern of destal1 in An. stephensi male heads maintained under DD (constant dark) condition. The housekeeping gene RPS7 (AsS7) was used as the internal control for qRT-PCR. Data were normalized to median fold change. Circadian day and night are indicated by the horizontal gray and black (indicating subjective day and subjective night, respectively) bars below the charts. (F) Effect of prolonged light on desat1 transcript abundance in male An. stephensi heads. After being maintained at 27°C under LD cycling for 3 days, male mosquitoes were either kept in the LD condition or switched to the LL condition. Mosquitoes were collected at ZT12 (lights off) and ZT14 (2 hours after lights off) for detection of desat1 expression levels. Error bars indicate SEMs. ns, not significant; *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01 (Student’s t test). Similar results were obtained from three experimental repeats.