That Fruitfly Will Beat You Up

Fruit Fly Aggression Studies Have Relevance To Humans, Animals:

Researchers in the North Carolina Sate University genetics department have identified a suite of genes that affect aggression in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, pointing to new mechanisms that could contribute to abnormal aggression in humans and other animals.

The study, led by doctoral student Alexis Edwards in the laboratory of Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics, appears online in PloS Genetics.

Feisty flies themselves may not be very scary, but their genes and biochemistry have more in common with those of humans than the casual observer might suspect, and geneticists can subject flies to experiments that simply can't be done on higher organisms.

To measure aggression, the researchers starved male flies for an hour and a half, then gave them a small food droplet and watched them duke it out, counting the number of times a focal fly would chase, kick, box, or flick his wings at other flies.

"Some animals will very vigorously defend their little food patch, whereas others are relatively polite," Mackay said. "To determine if this had a genetic basis, we conducted a selection experiment."

For the selection experiment, Edwards pulled three groups of flies - high aggression, low aggression and control - from the same baseline population, and kept them separate for 28 generations. From each generation, she selected the most aggressive flies from the high aggression group, the least aggressive flies from the low aggression group, and a random sample of the control flies, to be the parents of the next generation.

All the flies started at the same level of aggression, but after 28 generations of selection, the high aggression groups were kicking, chasing and boxing more often, while low aggression groups would hardly fight at all.

Hey, these are my neighbors from upstairs. And note how Trudy Mackay knows what to tell the reporter so not to end up with one of those "Gene for X" titles:

Selection experiments only show these kinds of results when there is some genetic control over the trait being selected. In this case, the genetic effect was not very strong - the heritability, or genetic contribution to, aggressive behavior was about 10 percent. The other 90 percent had to be attributed to environmental variation.

"This is definitely not genetic predeterminism," Mackay said. "It's a susceptibility. Even in flies, in the constant environment in which we grow them, the environment is more important than the genes. But we are very interested in that small genetic contribution."

Read the rest, it's cool...