Pheromones nonvolatile

Rats ovulate when exposed to soiled bedding from males. The stimulus is nonvolatile, as a wire screen can eliminate this response. Vomeronasal organ occlusion reduces the response, implicating this pathway for priming pheromone reception in this species (Johns etal., 1978). Table 8.2 summarizes the role of the vomeronasal in priming effects in rodents. 

Ford, N. B. and Low, J. R. (1984). Sex pheromone source location by garter snakes a mechanism for detection of direction in nonvolatile trails. Journal of Chemical Ecology 10, 1193-1199. 

Levinson et al. (1991) reported that a nitrogenous waste, guanine (2-amino-6-hydroxypurine), functioned as an aggregation pheromone of the flour mite Ac. siro, together with ammonia as a kairomone. However, because guanine is nonvolatile, it should probably be classified as an arrestant rather than an aggregation pheromone. 

Insect chemosensory organs have been differentially developed for taste and olfactory sensing. The contact and the distant chemosensory sensilla are responsible for nonvolatile and volatile chemical reception, respectively. The CHCs with long carbon chains are non-volatile, and therefore thought to be received by taste sensilla (Ebbs and Amrein, 2007). However, because of their insolubility in water, it was very difficult to obtain response recordings to them from taste sensilla. Success was recently obtained, however, in Drosophila melanogaster, where a male-specific CHC as a sex-pheromone inhibiting male-male courtship was found to stimulate the bitter taste receptor neuron within the... 

One of the few nonvolatile pheromones discussed in this chapter is a 14.5 kDa lysozyme protein identified as an egg recognition pheromone of the termite Reticulitermes speratus 933... 

The red-sided garter snake pheromone components were isolated by hexane extraction of the skin lipids of sacrificed snakes. Female snakes yielded more total lipid than males (38.4 versus 8.4mg snake-1)80 Initial fractionation on an activity III alumina column gave a fraction (eluted with 98 2, hexanes ethyl ether) that was attractive to courting males. NMR and infrared (IR) spectra of this fraction were suggestive of the presence of methyl ketones, straight chain alkyl lipid subunits, and Z-alkenes. GC—MS analysis, including extensive consideration of the fragmentation of the electron impact MS data, led to the identification of a family of relatively nonvolatile (C29—C37) lipid methyl ketones. Specifically, the individual components of a mixture of saturated and monounsaturated methyl ketones 18—30 were identified. 

Gangrade and Dominic (341) observed that this effect is high if a female is placed and housed below correlated males, but is reduced when the female is housed above the males and concluded that the pheromone involved in the Bruce effect is apparently nonvolatile and acts on females through contact. 

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