关键词: 性激素, 雌二醇, 昆虫, 生理作用, 生物合成, 雌激素类似物

Abstract: Sex hormones including estrogens and androgens mainly exist in higher animals, especially in mammals. Sex hormones play an irreplaceable role in regulating the growth and maturation of accessory sex organs of higher animals, stimulating and maintaining their secondary sex characteristics, as well as enhancing the combination of sex cells and their breeding capability. With the application of more sensitive analytical technologies, more and more studies have shown that sex hormones are not limited to higher animals. Invertebrates including insects also contain sex hormones. Insects, e.g., Bombyx mori and Spilopsyllus cuniculi, treated by sex hormones or hormone analogues of higher animals could produce certain responses. Studies also showed that some enzymes in insects, e.g., hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases, are used to catalyze and synthesize sex hormones. Based on the examples of estrogens and a comprehensive summary about the identification, metabolism and physiological action of estrogens of higher animals in insects, we analyzed the synthesis and reaction of sex hormones in insects as well as the possibilities of sex hormones of higher animals acting as sex hormones of insects in this article. As the main estrin of higher animals, estrogens widely exist in organs and extracts of insects. Present studies have confirmed that insects such as B. mori could metabolize estrogens and using estrogens to treat some insects will also influence their physiological process. Estrogens have remarkable regulation function in many physiological processes of higher animals but they mainly function as sex hormones to adjust the physiological processes related to genders. To determine whether vertebrates’ estrogens exist in insects and function as sex hormones, related researches could mainly be conducted from the following three aspects: firstly, whether the estrogen analogues can be detected in insects; secondly, whether the estrogens can generate similar function as female-related physiological responses and whether the estrogen analogues extracted from insects have corresponding function in higher animals; thirdly, whether insects can synthesize estrogens and whether the enzymes that catalyze this synthesis exist in vivo.

Key words: Sex hormone, estradiol, insect, physiological action, biological synthesis, estrogen analogues