Phenotypic coupling of sleep and starvation resistance evolves in D. melanogaster

BMC Evolutionary Biology

David J. Begun¹  Julie Cridland¹  Sophia Davis¹  Hayley Sheehy¹  Adam Tarakji¹  Nossin Khan¹  Ashley Kochummen¹  Ryan Hatmaker¹  Didem P. Sarikaya²  Joanna Chiu³ 

[1] Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA;Department of Evolution and Ecology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA;Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA;Department of Nematology and Entomology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA;

关键词: Local adaptation;    Sleep;    Starvation resistance;    Behavior;    Trade-off;    Plasticity;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12862-020-01691-8

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundOne hypothesis for the function of sleep is that it serves as a mechanism to conserve energy. Recent studies have suggested that increased sleep can be an adaptive mechanism to improve survival under food deprivation in Drosophila melanogaster. To test the generality of this hypothesis, we compared sleep and its plastic response to starvation in a temperate and tropical population of Drosophila melanogaster.ResultsWe found that flies from the temperate population were more starvation resistant, and hypothesized that they would engage in behaviors that are considered to conserve energy, including increased sleep and reduced movement. Surprisingly, temperate flies slept less and moved more when they were awake compared to tropical flies, both under fed and starved conditions, therefore sleep did not correlate with population-level differences in starvation resistance. In contrast, total sleep and percent change in sleep when starved were strongly positively correlated with starvation resistance within the tropical population, but not within the temperate population. Thus, we observe unexpectedly complex relationships between starvation and sleep that vary both within and across populations. These observations falsify the simple hypothesis of a straightforward relationship between sleep and energy conservation. We also tested the hypothesis that starvation is correlated with metabolic phenotypes by investigating stored lipid and carbohydrate levels, and found that stored metabolites partially contributed towards variation starvation resistance.ConclusionsOur findings demonstrate that the function of sleep under starvation can rapidly evolve on short timescales and raise new questions about the physiological correlates of sleep and the extent to which variation in sleep is shaped by natural selection.

【 授权许可】

CC BY