Temperature and Nutrition Shape Genetic Basis of Body Size and Trait Scaling Independently in Fruit Flies
A new preprint study using ~200 isogenic Drosophila melanogaster lineages found that the genetic basis of body size plasticity driven by temperature is largely uncorrelated with that driven by nutrition. Researchers measured wing and leg size across multiple nutritional and thermal conditions, finding extensive genetic variation in how each trait responds to each environmental factor, but no shared genetic architecture between the two. This suggests that predicting how organisms evolve in response to environmental variation may be far more complex than previously assumed.
Researchers studying Drosophila melanogaster have found that temperature and nutrition independently shape the genetic architecture of body size plasticity and morphological scaling. Using approximately 200 isogenic fly lineages, the team measured wing and leg size under varying nutritional and thermal conditions, estimating each lineage's plasticity responses and the individual-level scaling relationships (ILSRs) between wing and leg size. A key finding was that a lineage's thermal plasticity showed no genetic correlation with its nutritional plasticity for either wings or legs, and the slopes of thermal and nutritional ILSRs were likewise genetically uncorrelated. Furthermore, the slope of a lineage's nutritional ILSR at one temperature did not predict its slope at another temperature, though the overall pattern of nutritional ILSRs was broadly conserved across temperatures. These results challenge the assumption that genetic variation measured in a single environment can reliably predict evolutionary responses to selection in more complex, heterogeneous environments. The findings have implications for understanding how developmental mechanisms regulating trait size and morphological scaling evolve under natural conditions where multiple environmental stressors operate simultaneously.
What's missing
As a preprint, this study has not yet undergone peer review, so findings should be interpreted with caution. It remains unclear whether these results generalize to other organisms or natural environments beyond the controlled laboratory setting studied.
What different sources said
- bioRxivCenter
Scaling Across Environments: Temperature and nutrition independently shape the genetics of size plasticity and morphological scaling
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