Fruit fly aggression traced to gene
Gender-bending fruit flies duking it out in a Harvard fight club have helped scientists trace aggressive behavior to their genes.
Female flies with a male version of a gene dubbed “fruitless” tended to fight like males, lunging at their opponents and swinging their arms like boxers, according to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Males with the female “fruitless” gene preferred the shoving and head-butting techniques more commonly associated with female flies.
Geneticist Barry Dickson, the study’s senior author, had previously linked the “fruitless” gene to courtship behavior, finding that female Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies with the male version of the gene rebuffed advances by males. Instead, they initiated a mating dance intended to woo other females.
“We began to think that this could be interesting in the context of aggression too,” said Dickson, scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
Dickson sent some flies -- along with a postdoctoral fellow -- to the Harvard Medical School lab of neurobiologist Edward Kravitz, who has spent five years documenting fruit flies’ normal fighting behavior. The researchers put the mutant flies on a food plate and videotaped the matchups, where they observed the role-reversing behavior.
Humans have no “fruitless” gene, so controlling their aggression will take more than tweaking one gene. But the researchers said the experiments could clarify how genes hard-wire behaviors into the nervous system.
