Abstract

Drosophila melanogaster displays social behaviors including courtship, mating, aggression, and group foraging. Recent studies employed social network analyses (SNAs) to show that D. melanogaster strains differ in their group behavior, suggesting that genes influence social network phenotypes. Aside from genes associated with sensory function, few studies address the genetic underpinnings of these networks. The foraging gene (for) is a well-established example of a pleiotropic gene that regulates multiple behavioral phenotypes and their plasticity. In D. melanogaster, there are two naturally occurring alleles of for called rover and sitter that differ in their larval and adult food-search behavior as well as other behavioral phenotypes. Here, we hypothesize that for affects behavioral elements required to form social networks and the social networks themselves. These effects are evident when we manipulate gene dosage. We found that flies of the rover and sitter strains exhibit differences in duration, frequency, and reciprocity of pairwise interactions, and they form social networks with differences in assortativity and global efficiency. Consistent with other adult phenotypes influenced by for, rover-sitter heterozygotes show intermediate patterns of dominance in many of these characteristics. Multiple generations of backcrossing a rover allele into a sitter strain showed that many but not all of these rover-sitter differences may be attributed to allelic variation at for. Our findings reveal the significant role that for plays in affecting social network properties and their behavioral elements in Drosophila melanogaster.

摘要

黑腹果蝇表现出社交行为，包括求爱、交配、攻击和群体觅食。最近的研究采用社交网络分析 (SNA) 来表明D. melanogaster菌株的群体行为不同，这表明基因影响社交网络表型。除了与感觉功能相关的基因外，很少有研究涉及这些网络的遗传基础。觅食基因(for)是调节多种行为表型及其可塑性的多效性基因的一个公认例子。在黑腹果蝇中，有两个天然存在的等位基因for称为流浪者和保姆，它们的幼虫和成年食物搜索行为以及其他行为表型不同。在这里，我们假设影响形成社交网络和社交网络本身所需的行为元素。当我们操纵基因剂量时，这些影响是显而易见的。我们发现漫游者和保姆品系的苍蝇在成对交互的持续时间、频率和互惠性方面表现出差异，并且它们形成了在分类性和全局效率方面存在差异的社交网络。与受for影响的其他成人表型一致, 漫游者-保姆杂合子在许多这些特征中显示出中间优势模式。将漫游者等位基因回交到坐者菌株的多代表明，许多但不是所有这些漫游者 - 坐者差异可能归因于for 的等位基因变异。我们的研究结果揭示了在黑腹果蝇中影响社交网络属性及其行为元素的重要作用。