Do Candidate Genes Mediating Conspecific Sperm Precedence Affect Sperm Competitive Ability Within Species? A Test Case in <i>Drosophila</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When females mate to multiple males, the last male to mate fathers the majority of progeny. When males of different species inseminate a female, the sperm of the male conspecific to the female is favored in fertilization in a process known as conspecific sperm precedence (CSP). A large number of studies in Drosophila have assayed the genetic basis of sperm competition, with a main focus on D. melanogaster and accessory gland protein genes. Only a few studies have attempted to disentangle the genetic basis of CSP between related species of Drosophila. Although there is no a priori reason to believe that genes influencing intraspecific sperm competitive ability might also mediate conspecific sperm precedence, no study has addressed the question. Here, we test a group of candidate CSP genes between D. simulans and D. mauritiana for their effect on sperm competition in D. melanogaster. The use of P-element insertion lines identified CG14891 gene disruption as the only one causing a significant decrease in second male paternity success relative to wild-type and ebony tester males. The gene disruption affected both sperm displacement and the sperm fertilizing ability. Out of five genes tested using RNA interference, only gene knockdown of CG6864(Mst89B) [corrected] significantly reduced the male's ability to father progeny when second to mate. Our results suggest that CG14891 and CG6468 might have been co-opted from an intraspecies gene function (i.e., sperm competition) into an interspecies avoidance phenotype (i.e., CSP). Alternatively, the dual role of these genes could be a consequence of their pleiotropic roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".