Genetic Variation in Trophic Avoidance Behaviour Shows Fruit Flies are Generally Attracted to Bacterial Substrates.

ABSTRACT: Pathogen avoidance behaviours are often assumed to be an adaptive host defence. However, there is limited experimental data on heritable, intrapopulation phenotypic variation for avoidance, a strong prerequisite for adaptive responses to selection. We investigated trophic pathogen avoidance in 122 inbred Drosophila melanogaster lines, and in a derived outbred population. Using the FlyPAD system, we tracked the feeding choice that flies made between substrates that were either clean or contained a bacterial pathogen. We uncovered significant, but weakly heritable variation in the preference index amongst fly lines. However, instead of avoidance, most lines demonstrated a preference for substrates containing several bacterial pathogens, showing avoidance only for extremely high bacter

SUBMITTER: Monteith KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11550905 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature