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

BMC Evolutionary Biology

article

Sarikaya, Didem P.¹  Begun, David J.¹  Cridland, Julie¹  Tarakji, Adam¹  Sheehy, Hayley¹  Davis, Sophia¹  Kochummen, Ashley¹  Hatmaker, Ryan¹  Khan, Nossin¹  Chiu, Joanna³ 

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

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

DOI  :  10.1186/s12862-020-01691-8

学科分类：护理学

来源: BioMed Central

【 摘 要 】

One 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. We 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. Our 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|CC0