Blood, Sex and Lipids

Date

Oct 30, 2026

Time

12:00 AM - 12:05 AM

Speaker

Klaus Reinhardt

Affiliation

TU Dresden, Germany

Language

en

Main Topic

Biologie

Host

Postdocs

Description

Halloween requires the presence of blood and horror (as well as drinks and sometimes bats). In my talk I will cover all four aspects. Bed bugs binge drink (about three times their body weight), and they only drink blood. For females, drinking blood comes with sex, which, as I will present, denotes the horror part (if that is insufficient for horror, I will bring a picture from a heavily infested room). Sex is traumatic for females – copulatory wounding occurs at every mating - and I will quantify the trauma and show what females do about that. Traumatic insemination also lead to some unusual sperm biology. I will examine some of the sperm biology separately for the two genetically separated clades of bed bugs that either drink human or bat blood. Human and bat blood produce bed bug sperm that differ predictably in lipid profiles, and in sperm metabolism. This contrasts with Drosophila, where we find that, in the testes, sperm are protected from incorporating dietary lipids but instead take them up from lipid vesicles in the seminal fluid (called microcarriers). Sperm then shuttle dietary sterols to the offspring where they seem to enhance offspring growth, possibly because sterols are the precursor for the insect growth hormone.

Last modified: Oct 1, 2026, 7:38:52 AM