Animals often use sex pheromones for mate choice and reproduction. As for other signals, the genetic control of the emission and perception of sex pheromones must be tightly coadapted, and yet we still have no worked-out example of how these two aspects interact. Most models suggest that emission and perception rely on separate genetic control. We have identified aDrosophila melanogastergene,desat1, that is involved in both the emission and the perception of sex pheromones. To explore the mechanism whereby these two aspects of communication interact, we investigated the relationship between the molecular structure, tissue-specific expression, and pheromonal phenotypes ofdesat1. We characterized the fivedesat1transcripts—all of which yielded the same desaturase protein—and constructed transgenes with the differentdesat1putative regulatory regions. Each region was used to target reporter transgenes with either (i) the fluorescent GFP marker to revealdesat1tissue expression, or (ii) thedesat1 RNAisequence to determine the effects of genetic down-regulation on pheromonal phenotypes. We found thatdesat1is expressed in a variety of neural and nonneural tissues, most of which are involved in reproductive functions. Our results suggest that distinctdesat1putative regulatory regions independently drive the expression in nonneural and in neural cells, such that the emission and perception of sex pheromones are precisely coordinated in this species.