{"id":10372,"date":"2018-07-24T17:21:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T21:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/?p=10372"},"modified":"2018-07-25T09:01:48","modified_gmt":"2018-07-25T13:01:48","slug":"dartmouth-researchers-discover-that-fruit-fly-species-use-social-learning-to-protect-offspring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/2018\/dartmouth-researchers-discover-that-fruit-fly-species-use-social-learning-to-protect-offspring\/","title":{"rendered":"Dartmouth Researchers Discover That Fruit Fly Species Use Social Learning to Protect Offspring"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drosophila melanogaster<\/em> (Photo: Shutterstock)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster<\/em>) have a number of attributes that have made them one of the most extensively studied and well understood of all model organisms used in biomedical research. These include sharing many of the genes that cause diseases in humans, having a relatively small genome (fully sequenced in 2000), a short life cycle, and a large number of offspring.<\/p>\n

Still, as findings from a Dartmouth study<\/a> published last week in the journal PLOS Genetics\u00a0<\/em>show\u2014fruit fly behavior, in particular the way in which different fruit fly species communicate with one another when their offspring are threatened, is far more complex than was previously thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew from past experiments in the lab that when fruit flies within a given species are exposed to parasitoid wasps\u2014which deposit their eggs into and kill the larvae of fruit flies\u2014they will decrease their egg production to protect their offspring,\u201d explains Balint Kacsoh, a PhD candidate in the Bosco Lab<\/a> at the Geisel School of Medicine, who served as lead author on the study. \u201cThey can also communicate that threat, using wing movements, to na\u00efve flies who will then lay fewer eggs, even though they\u2019ve never been exposed to wasps.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the new study, the Dartmouth team sought to determine whether different species of fruit flies could communicate in the same way. They found that flies with previous wasp exposure could communicate the threat to their distant relatives, though not as effectively as with members of their own species. However, this interspecies communication was enhanced when flies of different species lived together\u2014remarkably, communal living allowed the flies to learn each other\u2019s \u201cdialects\u201d through the sharing of different visual and scent cues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat really surprised us, that an insect that we think is so simple and whose behavior is mostly thought of as being hard-wired, has this complicated repertoire of language, and that socialization has such a big impact on its ability to learn and interpret cues in its environment,\u201d says Kacsoh.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re really excited about the discovery that Balint, and his lab partner Julianna (Lita) Bozler, have made\u2014it\u2019s showing us a whole new aspect of fruit fly biology and behavior that no one has really appreciated before,\u201d says Giovanni Bosco, PhD, a professor of molecular and systems biology at Geisel, who heads up the Bosco Lab. \u201cWith our ability to manipulate fruit flies at the genetic level, we now have a window of opportunity to try and understand the details of how social behavior develops, and to gain new insights into diseases like autism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Importantly, says Bosco, the discovery came as a result of the team\u2019s willingness to take a different approach, which was risky. \u201cEverybody who studies fruit flies usually grows them as a single species in the lab,\u201d he explains. \u201cBy mixing species together, they were able to observe and test the flies within the context of their natural environment, as we might normally see them in our kitchens and our compost piles.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nice thing about working in Gio\u2019s lab is that he\u2019s very supportive, and he lets us follow these ideas,\u201d says Kacsoh, \u201cand the science is what really drives us to figure out what the best answer is.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team plans to build on their work by shedding light on the neural circuitry that controls dialect learning. \u201cSo far, we\u2019ve found a number of different clusters\u2014including the optic lobes for visual cues, the olfactory processing centers, and the learning and memory center\u2014that are very important in the dialect learning process,\u201d Kacsoh. \u201cWe\u2019re excited to see where that takes us.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think this important research project beautifully illustrates the Dartmouth paradigm, where research is driven by students working closely with faculty on cutting-edge problems,\u201d says Dean Madden, PhD, professor of biochemistry and cell biology and vice provost for research at Geisel. \u201cLearning by doing\u2014that\u2019s how students become discoverers.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new study by Geisel researchers, which appears in the journal PLOS Genetics, reveals that fruit flies are capable of learning the dialects of other fly species through communal living. Lead author Balint Kacsoh describes how fruit flies use a complex set of cues to warn one another about the threat of predatory wasps. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":10373,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-research","author-26"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2018\/07\/fruitfly-shutterstock_14703085.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4r3h1-2Hi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10372"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10382,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10372\/revisions\/10382"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geiselmed.dartmouth.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}