Evolutionary Proteomics Reveals Distinct Patterns of Complexity and Divergence between Lepidopteran Sperm Morphs.

ABSTRACT: Spermatozoa are one of the most strikingly diverse animal cell types. One poorly understood example of this diversity is sperm heteromorphism, where males produce multiple distinct morphs of sperm in a single ejaculate. Typically, only one morph is capable of fertilization and the function of the nonfertilizing morph, called parasperm, remains to be elucidated. Sperm heteromorphism has multiple independent origins, including Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies), where males produce a fertilizing eupyrene sperm and an apyrene parasperm, which lacks a nucleus and nuclear DNA. Here we report a comparative proteomic analysis of eupyrene and apyrene sperm between two distantly related lepidopteran species, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) and Carolina sphinx moth (Manduca sexta). In both

SUBMITTER: Whittington E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6607854 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature